RabbitMQ service on Windows reports "started" state too early.

[alex-ht-work]

When we start the service on windows, the startup is complete in a second. But looking at the log files we can see that it takes it much longer to be ready to accept connections (in my observation, around 40 seconds when the system boots and around 12 seconds when starting from the Services console).

As a result of such behavior, any other service depending on RabbitMQ service will fail to start during the system startup.

Suppose, ServiceA depends on RabbitMQ and makes a connection to the local RabbitMQ node. Both services are configured to start automatically.
Windows will first start RabbitMQ service, wait for it to report the "started" state, then start ServiceA.
ServiceA will try to connect to RabbitMQ node and will fail, because RabbitMQ service does not accept connections yet.

[michaelklishin]

On Linux, there is a system notification mechanism that RabbitMQ can rely on. If there is such a think on Windows, we should adopt it, otherwise there isn't much that can be done.

[lukebakken]

Unfortunately the erlsrv.exe process does not support a means for RabbitMQ to indicate when it is done.

Here is where the code lives - https://github.com/erlang/otp/tree/master/erts/etc/win32/erlsrv

You can see here that the service is set to "Running" pretty much immediately -

https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/erts/etc/win32/erlsrv/erlsrv_service.c#L793-L803

Like @michaelklishin said, on Linux we can use systemd notification sockets to accomplish this. I thought about adding a similar feature to erlsrv.exe but have not had time or enough interest to justify the work.

[lukebakken]

We could also write our own service manager, or use something like this https://nssm.cc

You could probably accomplish what you want by using NSSM and a custom RabbitMQ plugin, though I'm not sure what notification features NSSM supports.

Again, it's not something that paying customers have reported as an issue in their environments so it is not yet a priority.