Intermittent problem with WCF service

Question

Hi there,

We have a website hosted with heart internet and are seeing some strange behaviour and have no idea what could be causing it at this stage.

It seems at random intervals our WCF web services will cease to work. The server will return the message that the service failed to start (System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException). I'm not sure how to actually see what this exception is.

The strange thing is that if we re-upload the dll and pdb for our web project and manually recycle the application pool through our hosts configuration tools the web services will work again.

Has anyone any idea as to why this could be happening? Presumably this is a problem with the host, but knowing how poor their tech support is, I'm reluctant to go them without any ideas as to how to solve the problem.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You could try to add this service behavior (serviceDebug) to get details of the exception in your messages (but mind you: everyone else might also get all those details, so maybe you don't want to enable this....)

<system.serviceModel>
   <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
         <behavior name="YourServiceBehavior">
             <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" />
         </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
   </behaviors>

and then of course you'd have to set the service's behaviorConfiguration to reference this configuration:

<service name="....." behaviorConfiguration="YourServiceBehavior" .. >

This could give you more info in case the exception happens.

Secondly: why on earth are you uploading pdb files ?? Those contain debug symbols only - typically neither needed nor wanted on a production system (but I don't think this has anything to do with the problem at hand).

Marc