Keep your application always running
Why an idle application is stopped and how AlwaysRunning prevents it.
To save server resources, an application that receives no requests for a while is stopped. The next visitor starts it again, so the first request after a quiet period takes longer than usual. This is the standard idle timeout of the web server.
The idle timeout is 3 hours
The idle timeout is 3 hours. A website is put to sleep only when no request at all has reached it for 3 hours; every request starts the countdown again.
For a large number of websites this is enough to keep them running all the time — a site with regular visitors, or one that is checked by a monitoring service, never reaches the limit. It becomes a problem when your application has to stay alive even without any traffic — for example when it runs background services, timers, schedulers such as Hangfire or Quartz, or keeps long-lived SignalR connections.
AlwaysRunning
AlwaysRunning keeps the application pool of your website running permanently:
- the application is not stopped when it is idle,
- it starts automatically after a restart of the application or of the server.
CPU and memory limits stay the same as for your plan.
| Plan | AlwaysRunning |
|---|---|
| Free | Not available |
| Premium | Available on request |
How to turn it on
AlwaysRunning is enabled by our support team. Open a support ticket in the Control Panel, tell us which website (or websites) it is for, and we will switch it on.
Good to know
- An application can still be restarted for other reasons — a deployment, a configuration change or reaching the memory limit. See Application keeps restarting or loses sessions.
- For jobs that only need to run at a given time, a scheduled task is often a simpler solution than a permanently running background service.
- The Free plan is not suitable for applications that depend on continuously running background work.