What is a scheduled restart and how can it help me?
We designed AlwaysUp to run your important programs 24/7, 365 days a year.
However, few Windows applications are built to run continuously for days and weeks. Sure, they start out great at first but soon enough they use up all your RAM, bog down the CPU, stop responding to network requests, or misbehave in some other way. Eventually, they break down.
If you’re lucky, that deterioration takes a long time. Indeed, you probably won’t even notice a slow decline if you routinely close the program before it becomes unusable.
But memory leaks and other imperfections eventually come to the forefront when you leave some programs running for a long time.
Regularly restart your program, to keep it “fresh”
The solution for a leaky program is to restart it every now and then. If you don’t give it a chance to run for too long, it won’t have time to deteriorate and fail.
How do I make AlwaysUp restart my application at a regular time?
To make AlwaysUp restart your application periodically, you have to:
Configure AlwaysUp to stop your program at the desired time, and
Tell AlwaysUp to restart the application whenever it stops.
Here’s how to do that.
Step #1: Configure AlwaysUp to stop your program at the desired time
To stop your application on a schedule, edit your application in AlwaysUp and switch to the Monitor tab. From there, check the Every box to enable the “scheduled stop” functionality:
If you expand the Day drop-down, you’ll see that AlwaysUp can stop and restart your program at different intervals. That includes:
Multiple times per day — every 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours;
Once every day;
Once per week, on the day of your choice.
Choose the period that works for your situation. From what we have seen, many customers favor once per week, with Sunday being the most popular day.
After selecting the period, you should set the time you want AlwaysUp to stop your application. Be sure to pick a time that minimizes disruption for anyone using your application.
Note that for hourly periods, the time is the first time to recycle your application. For example, if you choose to restart every 2 hours and you set the time to 5:00 PM, the first restart will take place at 5 PM, the second at 7 PM and the third at 9 PM. And AlwaysUp will continue that cadence until it’s interrupted.
Next, you can tell AlwaysUp to avoid restarting if your program is busy or someone is using the computer. Just check the But only if the following conditions are met box, choose your metrics and define your thresholds:
And finally, check the Reboot the computer option if you want AlwaysUp to restart the PC. Sometimes that’s necessary if the operating system becomes sluggish or unresponsive over time.
Step #2: Tell AlwaysUp to restart the application whenever it stops
By default, AlwaysUp will restart your application immediately after it stops. Because of that, you may not have to make any changes here.
You can find the setting on the Restart tab:
Once you’ve checked the box at the top, you’re good to go. If it isn’t checked, AlwaysUp will not revive your application after the stop you configured in step 1.
Can you show me a few examples?
Sure!
Example #1: Restart every Sunday at 3 AM
Here’s what it looks like to stop your application once per week, early on Sundays:
Example #2: Restart hourly starting at midnight
If you’re running an unstable program, please accept our sympathies!
In that unfortunate situation, you can have AlwaysUp reset the buggy app every hour, at the top of the hour, like this:
Example #3: Reboot your computer daily at 1 AM
If restarting your application isn’t enough, you can setup an off-hours reboot like this:
What are your best tips for scheduling a restart?
Tip #1: Choose a “quiet” time to restart your application
Stopping and starting your application can be disruptive. What if someone is using the software at the time?
To reduce the chance of interruption, please stop your application at a time when no one is likely to be using it. At a minimum, try to avoid normal business hours. And if you can, confine the drama to the weekend or maintenance window. What time works best for you and your team?
Tip #2: When rebooting, only proceed if no one is logged on
Instead of simply restarting your application, you can choose to reboot the entire PC. But do you really want to do that if someone is logged in? That may result in frustration — and lost work.
So if you’re going to reboot, please consider activating the No one is logged on to the computer condition:
Can you tell our readers a bit about Visual Approvals?
Visual Approvals is dedicated to empowering Australia’s building surveying businesses by simplifying the intricate building approval processes. Our mission is to reduce risk and foster growth within building certification businesses. We envision our software setting new standards of excellence in the building certification and regulatory sectors.
Streamlining approvals through extensive experience
Since our founding in 1998, we have deeply engaged with the building certification industry. From the outset, we have collaborated closely with essential stakeholders like building certifiers, engineers, architects, and town planners. This hands-on experience provided us with invaluable insights and feedback about the building approval process’s complexities and requirements. Leveraging this knowledge, we developed our software to streamline business processes and enhance efficiency.
Simplifying approvals with robust software
The complexity of the building certification process meant our goals were not achieved overnight. However, through continuous industry collaboration and rigorous software testing and refinement, we have succeeded. Today, we proudly offer a comprehensive building approval software solution that streamlines the entire process and equips certifiers with the tools they need to excel.
Committed to meeting industry needs
Our commitment to meeting the evolving demands of the building certification industry drives us to continually engage with industry stakeholders and seek improvement opportunities. Visual Approvals is dedicated to adapting to the changing building approval requirements and regulatory standards across all states and territories, delivering significant efficiency savings to the building and construction industries.
Why does Visual Approvals use AlwaysUp?
Many of our customers rely on Dropbox or OneDrive for their documentation, requiring them to be always operational. AlwaysUp ensures that the tools run continuously, regardless of whether the user is logged in, as long as their machine is turned on.
When a new or existing client opts to use Dropbox or OneDrive for their documentation, we install AlwaysUp to support this requirement.
We’ve been using AlwaysUp for the past ten years, and it has consistently met our needs.
What business problem does AlwaysUp solve?
We needed a solution to ensure that Dropbox or OneDrive were always running, facilitating seamless document transfer between the cloud and the customer’s PC.
To explain a bit more, understand that our customers are constantly on the road performing building inspections. Each person uses an iPad to complete necessary documents which are then copied to the cloud (OneDrive or Dropbox) and shared with the main office. It’s important that those documents are uploaded quickly and seamlessly.
By running AlwaysUp on the PC in the main office, we can rest assured that the documents edited on the iPad will make their way to the customer’s office, even if no one is in the office (or logged on to their main computer).
How many installations do you manage?
We’ve purchased an Unlimited OEM license for AlwaysUp, allowing us to install as many as needed to support our growing client base.
Did you evaluate any competitors of AlwaysUp?
Not really. We started out thinking we’d have to develop our own solution but we decided against that once we found AlwaysUp. We didn’t feel the need to look elsewhere because:
#1: AlwaysUp provides exactly what we need
We were able to install OneDrive and Dropbox in AlwaysUp in minutes. Any software we developed would be doing exactly the same thing — but then we would be responsible for maintaining it ourselves, and that would distract us from our main work.
#2: We received excellent product support
The team at Core Technologies is very attentive. They get back to us promptly whenever we have a question or hit a problem. For example, when Dropbox stopped working as a Windows Service for some of our customers a few years ago, Core Technologies was able to resolve the problems in a few weeks.
What are your favorite features of the software?
The most appreciated feature is its reliability. AlwaysUp keeps Dropbox running smoothly and notifies us if the system stops. While it likely offers more functionalities than we use, the features we rely on are stable and dependable.
Any other comments?
Working with Core Technologies has been a great experience. Their support team is responsive and helpful. We would highly recommend AlwaysUp to others needing a solution for continuous program operation.
In particular, AlwaysUp has been crucial for our iPad app, which uploads and downloads documents to and from Dropbox or OneDrive. The continuous availability ensured by AlwaysUp allows our clients to sync documents at any time, day or night, enhancing the overall solution we provide.
Are you having a problem running OneDrive as a service with AlwaysUp? Perhaps OneDrive.exe is running but your files aren’t being synchronized with the cloud?
We know that troubleshooting OneDrive in the isolated Session 0 can be difficult. Even if OneDrive is trying to tell you what’s wrong by displaying a helpful error message, you can’t see it.
OneDrive writes encrypted log files for “internal” use
On our quest to provide excellent support for running OneDrive 24/7, we were happy to discover that OneDrive systematically writes log files describing what it’s doing. And those files are quite detailed!
But before you start to celebrate like we did, the reality is that the logs are in a proprietary, undocumented binary format. They’re intended for Microsoft engineers — not mere mortals like you and me.
Fortunately though, that’s not the end of the story.
We can decode OneDrive’s encrypted log files
Even though OneDrive’s log files are encrypted, Yogesh Khatri’s OneDrive ODL reader can parse them. That free python script will run through a log file and produce a readable CSV file.
Yet even after decoding them, the log entries remain cryptic and difficult to understand. As we mentioned before, that’s because the contents are meant to be analyzed by the software engineers who support OneDrive.
For example, here’s what a decoded log file looks like:
As you can see, the lines aren’t particularly revealing!
In any case, we’ve found that the decoded logs can sometimes provide interesting clues that lead us in the right direction. They’re better than nothing, which is why we encourage you to send them to us for analysis.
How to send us your OneDrive log files
Basically, you’ll zip your OneDrive log folder and email it to us.
To do so, step by step:
Open File Explorer
Navigate to the folder where OneDrive stores its logs. It’ll probably be
On the other hand, if you’re running OneDrive with your personal account, you’ll have a subfolder named Personal, as pictured here:
Copy your subfolder (Business1 or Personal) to a temporary location. We don’t want to disturb OneDrive.
In the copied folder, remove all files with the .odlsent, .odlgz or .loggz extensions last modified more than 24 hours ago. There may be quite a few, going back days or weeks.
Once you’ve deleted those older files, you’ll be left with the recent activity and a few supporting files. For instance, we had 24 files on our machine after cleaning up:
Zip (compress) the folder. Afterwards, you can delete the folder.
Email the zip file to our support team (at support@CoreTechnologies.com). We recommend including your OneDrive diagnostics in the email, to tell us how OneDrive is configured on your computer.
That’s it. We’ll do our best to analyze your OneDrive log files and get back to you soon. Wish us luck! 🍀🤞
Have you ever been on a cruise or ferry? If so, there’s a good chance that your arrangements were processed by Versonix — an innovative Silicon Valley company supporting the travel industry for over three decades.
Versonix started using AlwaysUp way back in 2012.
Why does Versonix use AlwaysUp?
At Versonix, we’ve developed several proprietary Windows executables and Java programs to support Seaware — our market-leading cruise reservation system that processes 20 million bookings each year. And over time, AlwaysUp has grown to become an integral part of our day-to-day operations.
Most notably, AlwaysUp helps our business achieve the following:
100% uptime for important software
We install all our applications with AlwaysUp, to ensure that they are constantly up and running. The fact is that we can’t tolerate downtime, and we’ve largely eliminated that by using AlwaysUp.
Centralized application management
In the past, it was tricky to manage hundreds of programs serving dozens of environments across multiple servers. Our engineers were constantly fighting with RDP, Task Manager, the NET command and other Windows utilities.
But that’s all changed. By using AlwaysUp web service, we were able to connect our applications to a central, browser-based dashboard. And from there, we can stop, start or restart our any of our applications with a few clicks. It’s a very convenient solution — made possible by AlwaysUp!
What did you use before AlwaysUp?
We tried Microsoft’s free Srvany tool a few years ago. While it worked fine for making one application into a Windows Service, it’s quite impractical when you need to install hundreds. Furthermore, the lack of a GUI was a major shortcoming.
What are your favorite features of the software?
Beyond the basic “keep everything running 24/7” feature, our team relies on:
The Web Service API
By calling the AlwaysUp REST web services API, our middleware can stop, start or restart our applications programmatically. That flexible capability let’s us integrate AlwaysUp into our software development lifecycle, efficiently attending to maintenance tasks, software upgrades and more.
Tags
We tag each of our applications with the customer and environment it serves. We do that because it allows us to manage a set of related applications as a unit — both from AlwaysUp and from our web dashboard.
For example, we can easily stop all the executables supporting the QA environment because they’re tagged with “GRP_QA” in AlwaysUp. Without that grouping, we’d have to stop each application individually — a tedious process.
Any other comments?
Core Technologies has provided excellent support over the years. Whenever we’ve had a problem, you’ve jumped in quickly to resolve the issue. We really appreciate that professional response as we strive to support our own customers too.
We also appreciate the responsiveness of your development team. Even though your typical user isn’t running hundreds of applications like us, you’ve implemented several of our suggestions that make it easier to run the way that we do. Thanks for your help!
Microsoft’s engineers have been very busy in the three years since the last major release of Windows Server.
And as you can see from the list of updates included in Windows Server 2025 preview, the team focused on under-the-hood revisions to core technologies — instead of publishing new apps or pushing out eye-catching bells and whistles.
Here are the improvements that we found most intriguing:
#1: Hotpatching
Operating system patches — which plug security holes and occasionally tweak functionality — can be applied without having to reboot the server. That means you can roll out patches whenever you like, with zero downtime (and without the need to schedule after-hours maintenance windows).
#2: Next-Gen Active Directory (AD)
It’s clear that Microsoft spent significant effort “future-proofing” it’s popular directory service. For example, this new version of AD can address many more objects (the database page size went from 8k to 32k) and it can utilize more than 64 cores. The updates are numerous.
#3: Delegated Managed Service Accounts
Server 2025 introduces the new delegated Managed Service Account (dMSA). Unlike a conventional account, where you manage password complexity and lifecycle, Active Directory administers the credentials for a dMSA. Furthermore, you can restrict a dMSA to specific devices and contexts, which is ideal for protecting non-interactive use-cases.
If you’d like to find out more, check out this 30 minute video from the 2024 Windows Summit that highlights the technical upgrades in the new operating system:
Any changes to Windows Services?
Other than the option to use the new delegated Managed Service Account, Microsoft hasn’t documented any impacts to Windows Services in Server 2025.
In fact, everything looked pretty much the same as we played with the various tools.
But then, it wasn’t a surprise because that basic management tool hasn’t been updated in over a decade!
Is AlwaysUp Compatible with Server 2025?
Yes, AlwaysUp runs flawlessly on Windows Server 2025.
We installed a bunch of applications — including as Dropbox, OneDrive and Java — as services and let each one run continuously for at least a week. And after thoroughly examining the event viewer and our own debug logs, we didn’t detect any problems at all.
Does Service Protector work on Server 2025?
Like AlwaysUp, Service Protector ran without any hiccups.
To test, we employed our “bad service simulator” — a deliberately diabolical piece of code that randomly uses too much memory, hangs, or crashes. Service Protector was able to handle all eventualities, proving that Microsoft’s Windows Services API remains robust on Server 2025.
Afterwards, we focused on validating services that our customers run. Service Protector was able to babysit FileBeat, MongoDB and MariaDB as well as it does on Windows Server 2019 and 2022:
How about your free utilities? Any quirks on 2025?
And our most popular non-service software — MyFolders and http-ping — passed inspection as well.
Preparing for the official release (24H2)
Microsoft expects to make Windows Server 2025 available to all customers in the second half of 2024. Until then, we’ll continue to test drive the preview releases, to ensure that all our software is ready to go on day one. 🙂
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