“Windows could not start the “Rule Engine Update Service” on Local Computer. Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion”

I came across a couple incidents on this error lately and thought I’d blog about it so that it saves time and effort for many. For starters, this is a generic windows error and could be thrown by any Windows Service for that matter. From BizTalk standpoint, you may encounter this error while configuring BizTalk or on a random day when your security team patched your Windows server with the latest OS update.

There is something called a Service Control Manager (SCM), a special windows process that starts, stops and Interacts with Windows Service processes. It is located in the % SystemRoot%\System32\services.exe executable and just like any other process, this has a time out which by default is 30000 milliseconds (30 seconds). Consequently, any service or a sub-service that starts a transaction that takes more than 30 seconds will fail to start.

Now, the workaround as you may imagine is to increase this time out to a value good enough for the transaction to respond. And this is how you do it:

  1. Go to Windows Registry: Start > Run > and type regedit
  2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
  3. With the control folder selected, right click in the pane on the right and select new DWORD Value
  4. Name the new DWORD: ServicesPipeTimeout
  5. Right-click ServicesPipeTimeout, and then click Modify
  6. Click Decimal, type 60000, and then click OK
  7. Restart the computer

At times, processes need may need more than just 60000 milliseconds (1 minute) to respond and there is no way you can estimate it. So you may have to play around with a couple of values before the issue settles.

Written By
Rajkumar Damodaran

Reviewed By
Jainath Ramanathan

Microsoft GTSC, India