Sunday, February 03, 2008

windows service problem

I have been having a problem for weeks with a windows service that sporadically quit working. Fortunately, it never happened in the production environments. It only happened on my dev box. Tonight I finally figured it out.

The first thing the service does is log a message to indicate it started. It is also in a try/catch that logs exceptions to the event viewer. Turns out the event viewer had reached it's maximum size, so it would quit working and there would be no indication of the problem in the event viewer, because it was the problem.

I ended up changing an option to "Overwrite events as needed" from "Overwrite events older than 7 days." The production server was already set to overwrite as needed, which explains why it worked in production, but sporadically failed in dev.