windows service startup timeout

Question

Is there a way to set a different value for service startup timeout per service? I can change it using the ServicesPipeTimeout registry key, but it\'s per machine (http://su

Answer 1

I also had to deal with a service which may takes a few seconds/minutes to have a good Start. When the service starts, it tries to connect to a SQL Server. However, when the whole server was restarted , my service was starting BEFORE SQL Server. (I know about the Service dependency but it dont apply to my situation for a particular reason....). I tried to do a loop trying 10 times to connect to SQL Server, but Windows was killing my service before the 2nd try, because of the Timeout.

My solution : I added a Timer in the "onStart()" of my service. Then, the "onTick()" method of the service was trying 10 times to connect to the SQL Server (with a waiting of 30 in it). No more Timeout at startup.

So basically,

• My service starts in 5 seconds.
• A timer is launched 10 seconds after the service is started.
• The timer tries 10 times [waiting 30 seconds each time] to connect to the SQL Server.
• If it succeed, the timer will disable itself, if not (after 10 try), I stop the service.

Note the more elegant way to resolve the problem but maybe some part of my solution may help anybody in the same situation than me,