Lucee fails to start after Windows Update service packs

dev support
#1

Several client installations have been failing lately. I’ve been able to correlate most of the server outages to Windows Update applying a service pack and rebooting. When the system comes back up, Lucee (sometimes) fails to start. I’m not seeing anything in the catalina.*.log files.

I’m looking at one of those times in the Event Viewer and I found these events:

Error	2/11/2021 10:07:53 PM	Service Control Manager	7009	None
A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Lucee service to connect.

Error	2/11/2021 10:07:53 PM	Service Control Manager	7000	None
The Lucee service failed to start due to the following error: 
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

The same events are repeated for my Tomcat9 service (separate tomcat instance running on java 8 for a legacy app)

Any ideas?
Both are configured in Windows Service Control with startup type: Automatic.
Is it possible that Automatic (Delayed Start) might help?

I’ve tried changing that setting on one of the servers, but I have no idea if it will work, since it only seems to happen when updates are installed, and not every time or on every server…Manual reboot always seems to start up fine.

OS: Windows 2019 Server
Java Version: OpenJDK 11.0.3
Tomcat Version: 9.0.19
Lucee Version: 5.3.4.47

#2

I had a similar situation with the recent Windows update (Windows 2016 Server) where I was getting Lucee/Tomcat errors. After a few restarts and the update was completed all went back to normal. This lasted for a period of approximately 6 hours.

#3

I went back over the logs on a few sites and found that it was happening on only a few sites repeatedly, but on those particular servers, lucee and tomcat were failing to start half the time. On two of the servers in particular, each had applied 5 service packs, and one had failed twice and the other 3 times.

From what I’ve read, the Delayed Start option seems to be for this exact problem… Normally, all of the services try to start at once, causing each one to take longer as they fight over resources. I’m guessing that after a service pack reboot there’s even more housekeeping processes that the system wants to do at startup. Services set for Delayed Start only get run after the other “essential” services are running.

At the best of times, starting up Lucee (or any other JVM process) is not exactly fast…add another instance of tomcat and whatever Windows Update needs to do to finish installing the service pack, and I’m surprised it’s not happening more often. We’ll see what happens on the second Tuesday next month :wink:

…if it still fails, I also found a way to increase the startup timeout beyond 30 seconds.