.NET Windows Service with timer stops responding

Question

I have a windows service written in c#. It has a timer inside, which fires some functions on a regular basis. So the skeleton of my service:

public partial cl         


        

Answer 1

Like many respondents have pointed out exceptions are swallowed by timer. In my windows services I use System.Threading.Timer. It has Change(...) method which allows you to start/stop that timer. Possible place for exception could be reentrancy problem - in case when tickTack_Elapsed executes longer than timer period. Usually I write timer loop like this:

    void TimeLoop(object arg)
    {
        stopTimer();

        //Do some stuff

        startTimer();
    }

You could also lock(...) your main loop to protect against reentrancy.

Answer 2

I have made exactly the same as you in a few projects but have not had the problem.

Do you have code in the tickTac_Elapsed that can be causing this? Like a loop that never ends or some error that stops the timer, using threads and waiting for ending of those and so on?

Answer 3

unhandled exceptions in timers are swallowed, and they silently kill the timer

wrap the body of your timer code in a try-catch block

Answer 4

I have seen this before with both timer, and looped services. Usually the case is that an exception is caught that stops the timer or looping thread, but does not restart it as part of the exception recovery.

To your other points... I dont think that there is anything "elegant" about the timer. For me its more straight forward to see a looping operation in code than timer methods. But Elegance is subjective.

Memory issue? Not if you write it properly. Maybe a processor burden if your Thread.Sleep() isn't set right.

Answer 5

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842793

This is a known bug that has resurfaced in the Framework more than once.

The best known work-around: don't use timers. I've rendered this bug ineffective by doing a silly "while (true)" loop.

Your mileage may vary, so verify with your combination of OS/Framework bits.

Answer 6

Have you checked the error logs? Maybe you run out of timers somehow. Maybe you can create just one timer when you initialize the ArchiveService and skip the OnStart stuff.