Auto-Heal & Watchdog

Exaplay 3 includes a built-in crash recovery system designed for unattended operation in permanent installations, trade-show booths, and touring productions that run 24/7.

How It Works

Exaplay continuously saves its playback state to disk while a small background Watchdog service keeps an eye on the application. If Exaplay crashes or hangs, the Watchdog restarts it and Exaplay picks up playback from approximately the timecode where it stopped.

Enabling Auto-Heal

Auto-Heal is enabled by default. To disable it for a session, launch Exaplay 3 with the -fresh flag.

Watchdog Service

The Watchdog is installed as a Windows Service and starts automatically with Windows. You do not need to interact with it directly.

To check its status:

Get-Service -Name "Exaplay3Watchdog"

To restart it manually:

Restart-Service -Name "Exaplay3Watchdog"

Auto-Heal Configuration

Setting	Description	Default
Heartbeat interval	How often the engine writes its heartbeat (ms)	500
Miss threshold	Number of missed heartbeats before restart is triggered	10
Restart delay	Seconds to wait before restarting after a crash	5
Max restarts	Maximum automatic restarts within a rolling 5-minute window	3

Configure these in Config → System → Auto-Heal.

Manual Recovery

If the system does not recover automatically:

1. Check the Watchdog Service status (see above).
2. Look at the log file in Documents\Exaplay3\logs\ for the error.
3. Start Exaplay 3 manually; Auto-Heal will still restore the last saved state.

Skipping Auto-Heal Restore

To start with a clean state (ignoring any saved auto-heal data), launch Exaplay 3 with:

exaplay3.exe -fresh

This is useful after a major project change or when debugging.