Major Description
That's because when starting, karaf instances write to the file and the admin service may also write to the file at the same time resulting in data loss.
An easy way to replicate the problem is the following:
> each [ 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 ] { echo "Creating test$it"; admin:create "test$it" ; admin:list ; echo "Start test$it" ; admin:start "test$it" ; admin:list }
It most certainly looses instances before the end.