Symptoms

When trying to run or during an activity, a "The Service is unresponsive" error message is logged to the Info Log pane.
This may be followed a few seconds with an info message of “The Service is available”.

Reason

"The Service is unresponsive" message will occur whenever the CatTools Manager interface cannot communicate with the CatTools Service. Certain activities within CatTools are quite CPU intensive and as such communication between the Service and Manager is vital otherwise you will see these errors occurring.

Causes

There are two causes that we are currently aware of:

1. the CatTools_Service and CatTools_Manager processes are not given high enough priority; therefore another task running on the system is using system resources that CatTools requires for the activity.
2. anti-virus software running on the CatTools system with ‘real-time scanning’ (i.e. scanning files on creation, etc.) are interrupting the communications between the CatTools Service and CatTools Manager

1. use the Windows Task Manager to increase the priority of the CatTools_Service and CatTools_Manager processes.
   If this does not resolve the problem, monitor other processes to see whether there are any other CPU intensive ones and try lowering the priority of these processes. If this is not possible and raise the CatTools process priority does not resolve matters, you may need to look at installing CatTools on a dedicated system or one with a dual processor.
2. If anti-virus software is suspected, temporarily disable the anti-virus software and re-run the activity in CatTools to see if it completes without the error. If this works then you may need to create an exception or exclusion of the CatTools installation folder, so files created by CatTools are not scanned.

Versions effected

CatTools v3.3.x (service installations only)