Stopping sapstartsrv.exe on windows stops the complete instance

Have you ever wondered why stopping the sapstartsrv service (sapstartsrv.exe) in Windows environment brings the application down as well !

In UNIX/LINUX environment this is not the case , you stop/restart the sapstartsrv service it will have not bring the application server crashing down 😉

Motivation

I was working on my test system and I had to test some conditions for which I had to terminate the sapstartsrv service and restart it. I am used to Linux env where we manually call the sapcontrol -nr XX -function StopService SID to stop the sapstartsrv.

This time I was working on my winodws test so as usual practice I wen to services.msc , found out my sapstartsrv.exe  ( SAPSID_XX ) and stopped it. Then I began my other task which I was performing  and suddenly I got an alert/popup saying my user had been logged out due to “connection to partner broken “.

Oh boy! I had made a blunder 😐

Play it safe!

Now the question I came across this time was why is this behavior?

So I quickly logged onto my other test system which runs on RHEL 7 and tried the command :

sapcontrol -nr XX -function StopService SID

I got the result “StopService” OK

I wanted to confirm the status of my application instance, so I quickly ran the command :

sapcontrol -nr XX -function GetProcessList

Bingo! All the process were green!

(Again I started the sapstartsrv manually.)

So what was wrong with Windows ?

Understanding the behavior

I did some research on how the sapstart and sapstartsrv is called in both the OS environments.

Believe me there is a difference 😐

In unix/linux OS the instance is started by the “process” sapstartsrv and not the “service” sapstart.

The sapstart -service controls the start/stop of the application instance components ( dispatcher + icm + gateway+igs).So when you stop the sapstartsrv it will ot affect the system start/stop. As sapstartsrv would ask  “sapstart” to start child processes, (more information in startsap.trc)

Okay! Agreed , but what’s up with Windows?

Here comes the answer!!

In windows the instance is started directly by the start service (process sapstartsrv.exe). On Windows a “service” is a process ,sapstartsrv is such a user defined service . When you stop the sapstartsrv.exe it will bring down your instance as well 🙁

There is a very nice document explaining this behavior : SAP Start Service

What next ?

Next time before restarting the sapstartsrv.exe is windows be careful ! that’s IT

Regards,

Manjunath Hanmantgad