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AlwaysUp version 16.5 is out! Here’s what our team worked on in this new release.
The Application Advisor now supports the nginx web server
If you’re looking to run nginx as a Windows Service, you’re in luck. With the help of the versatile Application Advisor, you can now install nginx with a few clicks.
To take advantage of our expertise, start the Application Advisor (by selecting Application > Advisor from the menu) and choose nginx from the list of applications:
After you click Next, AlwaysUp will ask you to for the location of your nginx.exe file. Just enter the full path and continue:
In the next screen, AlwaysUp will ask for the location of the nginx server files:
From there, click Next and follow the straightforward prompts to complete the process. In a few seconds, you’ll have a new Windows Service that starts your nginx installation at boot and runs the web server continuously in the background.
Automatically restart your application if it’s using too many “handles”
Without getting too technical, a handle is a reference to an operating system resource. And as part of normal operation, Windows gives your application a handle whenever it does things like:
open a file;
start a thread;
use an icon/picture;
open a DLL;
write to the registry.
Unfortunately some applications never give those precious resources back to Windows. They just keep accumulating handles until they crash or hang.
If you’re running one of those misbehaving programs, AlwaysUp is here to help. The new “check handle count” sanity check will promptly restart your application if it hogs too many resources.
To deploy the new feature for an application already set up in AlwaysUp:
Edit your application in AlwaysUp
Switch to the Monitor tab
Check the Whenever it fails a periodic sanity check and click the Set button on the right.
In the Add Sanity Check window, select Check that your application doesn’t have too many resource handles open:
Next, set the maximum number of handles that your application should have open at any time:
Be careful with this setting. You don’t want to pick a value that’s too low because it will lead to unnecessary restarts.
Follow the remaining, self-explanatory screens to complete the process and save your changes.
And with that new sanity check in place, AlwaysUp will monitor your application and promptly restart it if it consumes too many handles.
Other fixes & improvements
We added a couple of buttons to help you catch and reduce errors when entering a Windows account on the Logon tab:
- Click the eye to show the password that you typed in;
- Click the lock and AlwaysUp will check that the password works for the account you entered.
If you like, you can now prevent the Application Advisor from automatically popping up when you start AlwaysUp and no applications are installed. Just check the Don’t automatically launch… box when the Advisor starts up by itself:
AlwaysUp now shows the CPU affinity in the “running” tooltip when the application is restricted to specific CPUs. It looks like this:
Are you running Windows on your Mac inside a Parallels virtual machine? If you have trouble applying your registration code, please upgrade to this latest version of AlwaysUp. The problems have been fixed.
As usual, please review the release notes for the full list of features, fixes and improvements included in AlwaysUp version 16.5.
Upgrading to AlwaysUp 16.5
If you bought AlwaysUp version 15 (after December 2023), you can upgrade to version 16.5 for free. Simply download and install “over the top” to preserve your existing applications and all settings. Your registration code will continue to work as well.
If you bought AlwaysUp version 14 or earlier (before December 2023), you’ll have to purchase a discounted upgrade to use any version 16. Please purchase upgrades here — you’ll save 50% off the regular price.
See the complete upgrade policy for additional details.
Thanks for reading!
