Starting, stopping, and pausing services

Starting, stopping, and pausing services are common actions you'll need to perform when administering a GIS server. For example, you may need to stop a service to change some of its properties. On other occasions, service restarts are often necessary for the service to recognize changes made to the source resource, such as a map document.

Where are the commands for starting, stopping, and pausing services?

In Manager, you can click the Services tab to display a list of services as well as the Start, Stop, Pause, and Restart commands. When you click one of these commands, it will apply to all the services in the list whose boxes are checked.

In ArcCatalog, right-click a service to reveal a menu for starting, stopping, pausing, or restarting the service. Alternatively, you can display the ArcGIS Server Tools toolbar that contains these same operations.

Starting a service

Starting a service makes it available for client access. When you start a service, the server instantiates the minimum number of instances you specified. As clients request the service, the server returns an available instance. If none are currently available, the server instantiates more instances to meet demand until the maximum number of instances is reached. At this point, any new clients that make a request for the service will be placed in a queue for the next available instance. Pooled services will continue to run with the maximum number of instances until you stop the service. Nonpooled services, however, will return to the minimum number of instances as client requests diminish.

Stopping a service

When you stop a service, the server immediately removes all instances of that service from the server. This frees up any machine resources that were dedicated to the service. Clients that were using the service may fail to work properly because the service is no longer available.

Pausing a service

When you pause a service, the server refuses any new client requests for the service. However, existing clients can complete their use of the service. Pausing a service doesn't remove instances from the server. You might pause a service if a data source required by the service is not available. For example, if your map services reference an ArcSDE server containing a geodatabase, and that ArcSDE server is down for maintenance, you might pause the map service until the database is available again. Because the instances of the service are not removed when you pause it, it's much quicker to start a paused service than one that is stopped.

Restarting a service

The Restart command stops the service, then immediately starts it again.