Creating a new ArcGIS Server site, creating a service, and deleting a service intermittently fails with the error message "timeout creating child process" will resolve itself after multiple retries.

Description

When creating a new ArcGIS Server site, the site creation fails intermittently with the error message:

 "timeout creating child process"

This error message is present in the ArcGIS Server’s devbug logs. This error can also occur when publishing or deleting services, whether they are ArcGIS Server-based services or Hosted services published to the Enterprise portal.

This issue only occurs with ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7 and earlier, installed on Windows systems. After encountering this timeout error, the operation usually succeeds when reattempting the request submission multiple times (whether it is creating the site, creating a service, or deleting a service).

Cause

It was discovered that recent updates on Windows Defender's Real-time anti-malware protection, from late 2018 and later, leads to increase in the startup time for ArcSOC processes leading to timeout exceptions when creating a new site, or when publishing or deleting services and/or layers in ArcGIS Enterprise.

This error is associated with a known defect, BUG-000121595, which is resolved in ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7.1. However, this issue can still occur on any previous versions of ArcGIS Server on machines that have Windows Defender updates.

Workaround

In Windows Defender, add an exclusion for ArcSOC.exe and ArcSOCCl.exe processes, as seen in the screenshot below:

For more information on how to exclude processes with Windows Defender, please see Microsoft’s documentation: Add an exclusion to Windows Security

If the error still occurs, please contact Esri Technical Support (for customers in the United States) or your Esri distributor (for customers outside the United States) to resolve this issue.