What does it mean when my attempt to stop a Windows NT service fails with ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE?

Raymond Chen

A customer reported that they had a sporadic problem: Their product includes a Windows NT service, and when their client program tries to stop the service, it sometimes fails with ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE. Their client program is written in C#, so it uses the Service­Controller.Stop method to stop the service, and the failure is reported in the form of an exception. In Win32, this turns into a call to the Control­Service function with the SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP code.

Under what conditions would an attempt to stop a service result in the error ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE?

One of the developer support escalation engineers used psychic powers:

Does your service terminate itself before the call to its Handler­Ex routine returns from the SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP request, or before the call to Start­Service­Ctrl­Dispatcher returns?

I’m guessing that the ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE arises because the service process terminated itself while the Service Control Manager was still talking to it, waiting for the service to report that it finished processing the SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP request. The error is ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE because the process on the other end of the pipe (the service) died.

The customer agreed that this was a possibility: When the service receives the SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP request, it signals a helper thread to clean up, and that helper thread may finish its cleanup and terminate the service process before the main thread can report a successful stop to the Service Control Manager.

A short time later, the customer reported back and confirmed that when they forced the race condition to occur, they indeed got the ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE error code.

I like this example of psychic debugging because it demonstrates how you can take something you know (ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE means that two processes were talking to each other over a pipe, and one side suddenly terminated), and think about how it could apply to something you don’t know (surmising that the Service Control Manager uses a pipe to talk to the service).

5 comments

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  • Henry Skoglund 0

    Hi, been a while since you wrote about psychic debugging! I just want to thank you for introducing that method of debugging, it’s been useful for me too. It’s kind of taking a holistic view of the whole problem, while also paying attention to all the small details that surrounds it.
    One additional method I resort to: “Whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution.”. That quote from Sherlock Holmes has also served me well during the years.

  • Keith Patrick 0

    I’ve gotten this specific error before, so when I see something like this, it’s usually more of a matter of remembering how i fixed it in the first place. Unfortunately, I never got around to putting together a personal knowledge base for these errors, so I have to count on my unreliable memory, but in this case, I remembered the error message immediately.
    I tend to use psychic (or intuitive) debugging more for multithreading, looping errors, bad IDisposable usages, and stack overflows (the latter of which sticks out like a sore thumb….nothing kills the entire debug session like SOE). But all those errors tend to have certain behaviors, which, if you put them together with a recent code change, usually solves the mystery.

  • Ian Boyd 0

    It is also extraordinarily satisfying when you have an actual solution the explains the problem. Computers aren’t magical: it’s doing something exactly rational and explainable.

    What isn’t fun if when there diagnostic steps are: have you tried running a virus scan? Have you tried sfc /scannow? Have you tried rebooting? Have you tried deleting your user profile and creating a new one? Have you tried reinstalling Windows?
    Aside from the last two (which I simply will not do), the hope of them is to make the problem unreproducible – you don’t know the problem, so you didn’t really fix it.

    It’s like randomly replacing parts on your car, or your 737 max, and hope the problem goes away. 

    • Adam Rosenfield 0

      Deleting your user profile is unlikely to help (and painful to reverse), but creating a new, clean user profile is a cheap and easy diagnostic step if you’ve exhausted other options.
      I once ran into a problem with Visual Studio that I couldn’t explain.  (I forget the details, but they’re not important.)  Uninstalling and reinstalling VS didn’t resolve it.  But when I created a new user profile and logged in as that user, the problem went away.
      After dumping both users’ registry hives and painstakingly comparing them, I finally narrowed down the problem: a buggy VS extension.
      I deleted the registry keys related to that extension under my original user profile, and everything was well again.

  • Joshua Hudson 0

    This actually is the tip of a really bad design in the service manager.
    StopService(…);
    CreateFile(serviceprocessbinary, … CREATE_ALWAYS …); // Error file in use.
    The correct fix would be to call TerminateProcess(GetCurrentProcess(), 0) on getting SERVICE_STOP but the service manager reports ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE rather than success. I could handle it, but services.msc doesn’t. Hint: if you get ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE that service isn’t running anymore.

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