What Does Azure WebJob "Pending Restart" Mean?

Question

What does "Pending Restart" mean? I have stopped and restarted my WebJob numerous times and that doesn't seem to fix it. Does it mean I have to restart my website? What caused my job to get in this state in the first place? Is there any way I can prevent this from happening in the future?

Answer 1

Usually, it means that the job fails to start (an exception?). Look in the jobs dashboard for logs.

Also, make sure that if the job is continuous, you actually have an infinite loop that keeps the process alive.

Answer 2

To add to Victor's answer, the continuous WebJob states are:

• Initializing - The site was just started and the WebJob is doing it's initialization process.
• Starting - The WebJob is starting up the process/script.
• Running - The WebJob's process is running.
• PendingRestart - The WebJob's process exited (for any good or bad reason) in less than 2 minutes since it started, for a continuous WebJob it's considered that something was probably not right with it (some exception during start-up probably as mentioned by Victor), at this point the system is waiting for 60 seconds before it'll restart the WebJob process (hence the name "pending restart").
• Stopped - The WebJob was stopped (usually from the Azure portal) and is currently not running and will not be running until it is started again, best way to see this is as disabled.

Answer 3

Also, take a look at the webjob log, it should hold cue to what's been happening.

if the JOB is set to run continuously, once the process exits (say you are polling a queue and it's empty) the job shuts down and status changes to "pending restart". Azure Scheduler will typically restart the process in 60 seconds.

Answer 4

Try changing the target framework to .NET 4.5. This same issue was fixed for me when I changed the target framework from 4.6.1 to 4.5.