Automatically Restart Crashed Or Hanged Applications
Don’t you hate it when programs hang or crash? I find it especially annoying when a background application like an IM client or a bandwidth monitor silently crashes – sometimes I only notice the problem hours later when I’ve already missed a bunch of messages. I’m sure you’ve encountered a few “Not responding” errors and some irritatingly crash-prone applications yourself.
If you have an unstable program that you absolutely need to run at all times, but don’t want to waste your time monitoring and manually restarting it every time it croaks, I might have something interesting for you.
Restart on Crash is an monitoring tool that will watch the applications that you specify and automatically relaunch any program that hangs or crashes. You can add any number of applications to monitor, enable/disable them individually and edit the command line that will be used to restart an application.
Restart on Crash doesn’t require installation and stores all it’s configuration data in a “settings.ini” file in the program’s folder, so it’s portable. It should be compatible with most NT-based Windows versions.
Download Restart on Crash (606 Kb)
Screenshots & Documentation
The main window
- To add a new application to monitor, click the “Add” button or press the Ins key.
- To delete on or more applications from the list, select them and click “Delete” or press Del.
- To edit the per-application configuration, double-click the correspoding row. This will open the editing dialog (see below).
- You can also access the RoC configuration by clicking “Settings” and view the activity log by clicking “Show Log”. The log contains information about crashed/hanged applications, executed commands, and so on.
Editing the monitor settings for an application
Well, this one should be pretty self-explanatory
One detail to keep in mind is that enabling the “It isn’t running” option will make Restart On Crash treat the application as if it has crashed even if you have purposefully it closed it. You can get around this by disabling the monitoring of the application before you close it.
The configuration dialog. Yes, that's it.
“Grace period” is how long Restart on Crash will wait before trying to terminate/restart an application that it has just terminated/restarted. This is intended to prevent a scenario where RoC kills a hanged program, restarts it, decides it has hanged again (e.g. if the program is non-responsive while starting up) and wrongfully terminates it again.
Known Issues
- If you configure RoC to automatically kill a hanged application, it will terminate all instances of that application when doing so. This may be fixed eventually.
- When autorun is enabled, RoC will not start minimized or hidden in the system tray – instead, it will launch as it normally would. I originally wanted to make it load in the systray, but apparently one of the component libraries I use harbors a hard-to-find bug that makes the application behave very strangely when loaded like that.
- Overall, this is an initial release – there are bound to be other bugs. Use at your risk
Hot shit dude, that’s a really nice and useful program!
It is very difficult to start a program from a Windows service due to Vista+ security. I can stop and close anything, but after updating I need to restart the program. This will do it easily so is a solution.
Thanks a lot for the great program, really usefull for me.
A couple of nags :
Where is the log file stored ? and can it be deleted
Can the program also get a wait timer in the autostart mode, so the program has a chanche to start up af a win reboot ?
The log is only stored in-memory, so it will be automatically deleted when the program exits.
I’ll see if I can add a wait timer for windows startup later (I’m currently away from my dev. tools). Alternatively, you could disable the normal autorun for the program(s) in question and just let RestartOnCrash start them on reboot.
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This is great! I use it.. it is simple and works very well.
Onlye have one problem
… Known Issues nr. 2 – System tray icon.
Best regards