Re: [topshelf-discuss] Issue with shelving in 2.3 - shelves stop responding?

[Dru Sellers]

re: the 2.x problems - it could really be either. I would try to capture some memory numbers and see if anything is going wonky there.

re: 3.x its one service only right now with a focus on increasing restart capabilities and upgrade capabilities. We have discussed bringing a form of shelving back. So please share what you would like it to do here. But know that it may be a while before Chris or I work on it. As always we take pull requests. :)

-d

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Steve <st...@scheffler.us> wrote:

We've been using topshelf 2.3 on a project now for a couple of months that takes advantage of the shelving feature. All in all topshelf has been great, and it's really simplified our service setup process. We're also using MassTransit with great success. So, first of all, THANKS for all the things that you're doing to contribute to the open source community!

We've run into an issue with one of our shelves where it seems to stop working after a few weeks of the service being on. The process is still up and running, it's just that the shelf isn't doing its work (as evidenced by its log files). 

As you can imagine, this is a difficult one to reproduce b/c it requires a long run time and even then it's intermittent. Has anyone else seen something like this occur with topshelf 2.3 shelves? Now, it's quite possible (shoot - likely with my stuff) that this is in our code, but figured I'd check here first.

Follow up question. I see with v3.0 that shelving support has been removed and may/may not be re-introducded. I liked the idea of being able to package multiple independent shelves under a single windows service, which is why we pulled in topshelf initially. Given the current project direction, would your recommendation be that people use one service per process, or is there some other mechanism (bottles?) wherein you see the shelving type approach being viable going forward?

Thanks!

[Travis Smith]

I think this is still up in the air. Topshelf 3.0 should be better platform to do shelving, but someone has to get motivated to actually make it work right. The 2.3 version is kinda sketchy, which you've obviously seen. I'm not dog fooding it like I was when I started the shelving project. 

If I had to guess with your current problem is that a fault is generated from your service and it's not handled gracefully enough. 

-Travis

[Steve]

Thanks for the replies, and I like the suggestion about checking on mem usage. 

On the shelving front, I was really using it to consolidate a bunch of small independent service like tasks into a single container. I wanted a way to group all of these pretty much unrelated things into a single unit to make it easier to deploy and manage on customer servers.

In practice we're really only deploying 4 or so services out to our clients, so there's not a strong need for a shelving container to manage that few number of things. So, for now, I think I'll look at moving over to v3 and adopt a 1:1 service to worker shelf type approach. 

Thanks again.