Windows service gone wild

[Paulo Oliveira]

Hello,

Please give me ints on this issue: I can figure this out.

I have a C# windows Service running every hour on a server since
may 28, 2005.

If a condition on a database is ok
sends a email to 3 persons
else
does nothing


Today, since 2:11 to 10:17 CET e received 138.146 emails on my mail box from de windows service.

Anyone got an ideia on why this when nutes? Any Ideia?

You can´t imagine what this has done to the exchange server!

[jmcilhinney]

Is there any way that the timer interval could have been changed so that it is performing this check more often?

[exterminator]

If the number of e-mails is 138 thousands something...then it looks like some infinite loop to me...

[Paulo Oliveira]

Take into account this:

It as worked ok for, 24hours * 60 days.

So, votes any one?
1) Its is an apllication error
2) Somekind of a server side error

Thanks guys.

[deesan]

I suppose your service should use some variable to store time of last firing.

If some exception occurs after sending of e-mails but before changing of this variable, then at next iteration service will try to send e-mails again.

[exterminator]

I vote for an application error. It should have handled such scenario. I know these once-in-while bugs that are very hard to reproduce during the testing but for sure its application error.

These are some questions from my side which you must ask urself or ur application developers - these might give u some more clues.

By the way, how do you start the service? Is there an automated process for that? What is the condition that it checks on the database? Is this condition being frequently changed from somewhere? How frequently do you query the database for this condition (an infinite loop?)

24 hours * 60 days = 5184000 seconds = 86400 mins...has this something to do with the application? Some variable reaching its limit..causing some exception...

I dont know - anything could be happening there...is hard to tell without the code or the application on the desktop. Just guessing. See if it helps. Good luck.