Symptom

Under certain scenarios such as heavy system load and the starting/restarting of BarTender engines, Integration and Print Scheduler Service can fail causing the BarTender engines not to start. You will see the following error messages.

Print Scheduler Service error messages

• The BarTender engine could not be started. Possible reasons are: 1. BarTender is not properly installed. 2. BarTender is not properly registered on the computer. 3. There are too many process instances of BarTender running. Stop a few bartend.exe instances and try again. Also see SDK Engine.Start method documentation for information about how to allow more BarTender processes to run on your computer by increasing your "non-interactive" shared desktop heap. 4. The user account does not have permission to run BarTender. Details:
  • Error number: 12, Reason Code: FailedStart: %s
  • The user account does not have permission to run BarTender. Error number: 12 ::CoUnmarshalInterface failed: 0x80070218

*The Print Scheduler Service log is located in C:\ProgramData\Seagull\Services\Logging\PrintScheduler.Service.txt.

Applicable to

• BarTender 2019 R3 and higher

• Integration Platform and Print Scheduler Service

Solution

These errors and symptoms indicate BarTender was having trouble opening a connection and communicating with Integration and Print Scheduler Service. It is possible that BarTender is taking too long to initialize and timing out.

Starting with BarTender 2019 R3 the following improvements have been made to Integrations and the Print Scheduler Service to make them more fault tolerant.

• The Print Scheduler Service will automatically make 3 attempts to start the BarTender engines.
• If they all failed, the Print Scheduler Service should not require a restart to execute subsequent print requests.

These improvements should almost resolve this issue in most scenarios. In the rare situation, you may also need to increase the timeout for the communication between Integration and the Print Scheduler with BarTender. You can increase this timeout by doing the following.

1. Open the Windows Registry

2. Go to the registry location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Seagull Scientific\BarTender

3. Create the registry key: BarTenderActivatorTimeoutMS as DWORD value type.

4. Set this registry key timeout value in milliseconds and base type to decimal. 60000 milliseconds (60 seconds) works best from our testing.