problem: services.exe crash on reboot

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mycroft Holmes
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M

Mycroft Holmes

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Hi,

sorry for cross-post, but it seemed appropriate.
I'm trying to describe a problem for which I'm not totally familiar, so I
admit my message could be slightly imprecise in terminology.

we have a large c++ projects that compiles a windows service (and its
dll's), that runs on some big 8-way opteron servers.
On each server there's a single executable for the service, but it's been
registered twice i.e. there are entries in the registry SERVICE_A and
SERVICE_B that refer to the same exe, with different configurations.

The servers reboot once a day and sometimes on reboot, services.exe crashes,
leaving the whole machine in a zombied state.
1) this does never occur if SERVICE_B is removed
2) this seems to occur ONLY on reboot: we stress-tested the servers using
multiple simultaneous "net stop/net start", and all is fine.

we assumed that, even by mistake it should be almost impossible to crash
services.exe. does anybody have hints?
thanks in advance,
MH
 
Re: problem: services.exe crash on reboot

Mycroft Holmes wrote:
> Hi,
>
> sorry for cross-post, but it seemed appropriate.
> I'm trying to describe a problem for which I'm not totally familiar, so I
> admit my message could be slightly imprecise in terminology.
>
> we have a large c++ projects that compiles a windows service (and its
> dll's), that runs on some big 8-way opteron servers.
> On each server there's a single executable for the service, but it's been
> registered twice i.e. there are entries in the registry SERVICE_A and
> SERVICE_B that refer to the same exe, with different configurations.
>
> The servers reboot once a day and sometimes on reboot, services.exe crashes,
> leaving the whole machine in a zombied state.
> 1) this does never occur if SERVICE_B is removed
> 2) this seems to occur ONLY on reboot: we stress-tested the servers using
> multiple simultaneous "net stop/net start", and all is fine.
>
> we assumed that, even by mistake it should be almost impossible to crash
> services.exe. does anybody have hints?
> thanks in advance,
> MH
>
>

One remote possibility is that your service depends on some other
service but the "dependencies tab" does not list those. Then the service
tries to access a dcom object in another service (which is not yet
initialized) and it is started simultaneously by rpc-server ( cant
remember the real names , sorry).

Does this error happen if you disable all but cpu on the server ?
If it happens then is it as frequent ?

ismo
 
Re: problem: services.exe crash on reboot

> One remote possibility is that your service depends on some other service
> but the "dependencies tab" does not list those. Then the service tries to
> access a dcom object in another service (which is not yet initialized) and
> it is started simultaneously by rpc-server ( cant remember the real names
> , sorry).
>
> Does this error happen if you disable all but cpu on the server ?
> If it happens then is it as frequent ?
>

no, we don't have dependencies on other services. we use msxml but no DCOM
the error never occurs in "smaller" servers, only on 8-way.
 
Re: problem: services.exe crash on reboot

Mycroft Holmes wrote:
>> One remote possibility is that your service depends on some other service
>> but the "dependencies tab" does not list those. Then the service tries to
>> access a dcom object in another service (which is not yet initialized) and
>> it is started simultaneously by rpc-server ( cant remember the real names
>> , sorry).
>>
>> Does this error happen if you disable all but cpu on the server ?
>> If it happens then is it as frequent ?
>>
>
> no, we don't have dependencies on other services. we use msxml but no DCOM
> the error never occurs in "smaller" servers, only on 8-way.
>
>
>

MSXML uses COM, I don't know what it does require from
com-infrastructure. Could you add a dependency for your service, it
could depend e.g rpc or something similar (just for testing) . This is
just for delaying its startup. The 8 cpus has enough horsepower to start
simultaneously many things, it might start your service too early. This
is just a quess.

ismo
 
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