I get this Null Pointer Exception on about 10% of my windows jobs

[Tim Jackson]

This is happening randomly on about 10% of my builds running the last few versions of Jenkins I have run - I am currently up to 1.656. Jenkins runs on a Debian VM with windows 7/10 nodes.  I have 10 builds that are all similar, but not identical and the issue is random among them.  It happens immediately as the job starts - the output below starts from the beginning and we get 1 second in.

The jobs are set to Discard Old Builds on 60 day log rotation, restrict on which nodes the jobs can be run, some code gets checked out of SVN (but I think this is happening before I get there)plus other things that I believe long after this in a successful build.


09:19:46 Started by upstream project "Nightly_Build_Firmware" build number 1118
09:19:46 originally caused by:
09:19:46  Started by user Me
09:19:47 FATAL: null
09:19:47 java.lang.NullPointerException
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.Slave.createLauncher(Slave.java:387)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.createLauncher(AbstractBuild.java:561)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:492)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1738)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:98)
09:19:47 	at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:410)

From what I can gather, this is probably caused by the node agent being unresponsive/unavailable at the exact moment Jenkins is trying to launch a task.  Does that sound reasonable?

Thanks for the input,

Tim