Action Collection not running error

After upgrading to Indigo 7.2, I have been getting the error "unable to execute action -- device plugin Action Collection not running" several times when starting up. The error didn't occur in a startup just before upgrading. Restarting the server doesn't help. I don't know know how to troubleshoot this, or if it's even important, since the error doesn't say what action could not be executed. Any suggestions? Thanks.

--Dave

[matt (support)]

Can you email us an Event Log showing two or three server restarts? We'll see if we can figure anything out based on that.

Will do

Well, that was easy. After having gotten the error through repeated restarts yesterday, I did a couple of restarts just now to comply with your request and no error showed up. Although I was working on some Homekit and Harmony Hub related issues, I can't think of anything I did relating to the error. And I always get better just as I call the doctor when I'm sick!

I'll let you know if it happens again but all is OK for now.

Thanks.

--Dave

As another data point I saw this last week after a restart of my mac. I was running 7.1.1 though, under High Sierra 10.13.6. Restarts of various plugins didn't do anything; shutting down and restarting indigo fixed it. Have since upgraded to 7.2.

Found the log file - extract attached. Looks like the start up of the action collection timed out.

-- Paul --

[jay (support)]

As another data point I saw this last week after a restart of my mac. I was running 7.1.1 though, under High Sierra 10.13.6. Restarts of various plugins didn't do anything; shutting down and restarting indigo fixed it. Have since upgraded to 7.2.

Found the log file - extract attached. Looks like the start up of the action collection timed out.

-- Paul --

Ok, so given that there were a bunch of plugins that timed out trying to start up, it seems likely that something was happening on your Mac to cause all those plugins to timeout when trying to start. Do you recall if that was directly after a reboot? I'm wondering what else the Mac might have been doing while the server was starting up and starting all those plugin processes. You'll notice that you see those timeouts happening 30 seconds after the server tried to start them up - that's an extremely long time to start up the host process that the plugin runs in, so I'm guessing that there were other things going on your Mac at the same time and it was just causing it to run really slowly.

There are a bunch of things happening at boot, but always have been! This is a new refurb mac mini, replaced the previous one a few months ago. The previous one was *really* slow, took about 10 minutes from boot to get indigo initialised. However I've never seen this issue before on either the old or new mac; don't know why this particular boot had the issue

I'm not holding my breath expecting to see the issue again!

-- Paul --

Just to clarify, this *was* after a reboot.

[jay (support)]

Do you have any startup scripts, particularly AppleScripts that might be doing a remote "tell" without a timeout? That's one sure way of hanging up the server because those scripts take 30 seconds to timeout if the remote Mac isn't reachable. But in general anything at startup has the potential of causing issues depending on the actions that it's performing.

I don't think so, I've had a trawl though the Indigo scripts folder, and the database and have no 'external' applescripts, and 4 internal ones, none of which tell to a remote mac.
Two are to tell iTunes (on the same mac) to increase/decrease the system volume; and 2 are tell IndigoServer to send an email. I need to replace the email ones with something else - I'll add that to my todo list.

It may be that I had my backup drives (6*2 or 3Tb volumes) turned on when I rebooted, so the disk checking mounting may have been extra busy, but again not the 1st time I've done this.

-- Paul --

One exception to the above statement ...

I have an external applescript that is called in my startup trigger and lives in under my home directory.

It does

Code: Select all

tell application "Airfoil"
   set linked volume to true
end tell


Perhaps Airfoil had an issue starting? Just in case, script changed to

Code: Select all

tell application "Airfoil"
   with timeout of 10 seconds
      set linked volume to true
   end timeout
end tell


-- Paul --

Edited to add improved script

[matt (support)]

You might also want to try enabling the delay checkbox (on the action panel) for that trigger. Maybe delay it by a couple of minutes once everything has cooled down?

Good idea - done.