Tentacle service fails to start on occasion

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1

I’m looking for insight on why the tentacle service might fail to start. A handful of times, we’ve observed these back-to-back errors in our event logs:

  1. A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Octopus Tentacle service to connect.

followed by

  1. The Octopus Tentacle service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

It’s possible that in the instances where we see these errors, the server was trying an automatic start-up of the service, following a system reboot. The thing is, several other servers experience the system reboot and automatic start-up of the service, yet we don’t see these errors on all such servers.

When we realize the offline status, we manually start the Octopus Tentacle service on the respective server. In these instances, the service starts up just fine.

Is there action we can take, so that we don’t encounter those error messages?

Thanks.
Lisa

2

Hi Lisa,

This error occurs if the service takes too long to start up. A couple of things can cause this:

  1. The event log on the machine might be full, or the disk is full
  2. The machine may just be very busy during startup

I’ll modify the Tentacle code to automatically request extra time during startup, but for now you can try modifying the registry to make the error go away. The default timeout is 30 seconds, but you can make it 60 seconds with the instructions below:

  1. Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
  2. To change the value data for the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value to 60000 in the Control key, follow these steps:
    1. Locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
    2. Click the Control subkey
    3. Right-click the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value, and then click Modify.
    4. Click Decimal.
    5. Type 60000, and then click OK.
  3. If the ServicesPipeTimeout value is not available, add the new DWORD value, and then set its value data to 60000 in the Control key. To do so, follow these steps:
    1. Locate and then click the following registry key:
      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
    2. Click the Control subkey.
    3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
    4. Type ServicesPipeTimeout, and then press ENTER.
    5. Right-click the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value, and then click Modify.
    6. Click Decimal.
    7. Type a value of 60000, and then click OK.

The value is 60000 milliseconds and is equivalent to 60 seconds or to one minute.
Note This change does not take effect until the computer is restarted.

Hope that helps,

Paul

3

Hello Paul,

Wow. Thanks, again, for the thorough guidance. We might hold off on making the registry changes until we see the issue occur more frequently, but it’s good to know about that option.

Lisa