Your role instances have recycled a number of times during an update or upgrade operation

Question

I am trying to deploy a Cloud Service with 1 Web Role to Azure.

When I do so, I get this message:

Your role instances have recycled a number of times during an update or upgrade operation. This indicates that the new version of your service or the configuration settings you provided when configuring the service prevent the role instances from running. Verify your code does not throw unhandled exceptions and that your configuration settings are correct and then start another update or upgrade operation.

The project runs just fine locally, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to start debugging this issue. Are there any common problems that cause this message or steps to figure out what is causing it?

Answer 1

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/kwill/windows-azure-paas-compute-diagnostics-data. This will walk through all of the diagnostic data available as well as how to troubleshoot the most common issues.

Answer 2

We also had this annoying problem and in our case:

1. We use local storage, but it wasn't defined in service definition (or Worker Role's properties)
2. Our worker role project has reference to a service project which has reference to data layer project. But, the worker role project doesn't have reference to the data layer project. As soon as we added reference to data layer project in worker role project, it deploys successfully.

Problem #1 can be easily noticed if you first run the project in your local machine. Exception will be thrown.

Problem #2, however, is more difficult, mainly because it runs just fine in local machine. After 5 days of trouble shooting, we finally found the problem. So, check all references and try to add sub-reference projects, those that are referenced by other references.

Answer 3

We had similar problem, and it was due to some DDLs failed to load. (due to different version from the one MS have deployed to the VM)

Try to set CopyLocal to "true" for all the References in the project, and re-deploy.