I develop a .Net WCF web service hosted as a windows service on Windows XP for development and Windows Server 2003 SP2 for deployment. We install several instances of the service (one for each logical environment) in one machine. After a certain number of instances the windows service fails to startup. The number of services that can be simultaneously running varies. The services run with a specific service account that has local admin rights. I have even created a simple windows service in .Net that does no WCF but just logs a timestamp to a log file and the behaviour is still the same. After certain number of services have been started the next one doesn't start. If I stop one of the running service and then try to start the service that failed it starts up. I am 100% sure it is nothing to do with application code. The number of instances that can be started increases after I reboot the machine but eventually it will hit a limit.
The error message when trying to start up from service control panel is
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TestService18.exe - Application Error
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The exception unknown software exception (0xc06d007e) occurred in the application at location 0x7c812afb.
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OK Cancel
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Can anyone give me some ideas on what can be causing this error.
Best Answer
Hmmm... that's an odd one. You're not the only one who has seen this. I suspect you're hitting a child process limit of some kind, but I'm not sure what would be causing it.