What does Windows error code 5952 (ERROR_CLUSTER_WATCHDOG_TERMINATING) mean?

 
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ERROR_CLUSTER_WATCHDOG_TERMINATING

Watchdog termination is a recovery action after lost progress

ERROR_CLUSTER_WATCHDOG_TERMINATING indicates that a failover-clustering watchdog has decided a monitored process or operation is no longer making acceptable progress and is terminating it. This is different from an ordinary application exit: the termination is intended to break a hang that could prevent resource recovery or cluster state transitions.

Capture dumps and cluster logs before repeated restarts overwrite the evidence. Identify the monitored process, pending resource operation, callback duration, and thread stacks. Resource DLL entry points must honor timeouts, report pending status correctly, and respond to cancellation. Increasing timeouts without finding the blocked I/O, deadlock, or unresponsive dependency can extend the outage rather than fix it.

Hang evidence to collect

  • Process and resource operation selected by the watchdog.
  • Thread dump and wait chains before termination.
  • Pending Online, Offline, LooksAlive, IsAlive, or control callback.
  • Storage, network, service, or synchronization dependency blocking progress.

References


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