headless mode on windows 10; system unable to sleep

[antares14943]

I run Factorio in headless mode on a spare machine in my home. I want the machine to sleep at night. This worked in 0.16 by default. I'm running 0.17.56 and this doesn't seem to work this way anymore.

I've tried setting SDL_HINT_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1, I've looked at https://wiki.libsdl.org/CategoryHints for more ideas, I've checked wiki for config parameters, and googled a bunch. I haven't been able to find anything that helps.

powercfg reports Factorio is the only thing preventing the system from sleeping:

Capture.PNG (91.46 KiB) Viewed 1627 times

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[Rseding91]

Shut down the server before you put it into sleep mode.

The game specifically tells windows to disallow sleep while it's running because it's a resource intensive game and the system should not be entering sleep mode while it's running.

[Optera]

If the server is set to pause while there are no players connected, windows should be allowed to enter sleep.

Otherwise it makes little sense to let it go to sleep while running game updates.

[Rseding91]

If the server is set to pause while there are no players connected, windows should be allowed to enter sleep.

Otherwise it makes little sense to let it go to sleep while running game updates.

It's running a always-on service. It makes no sense to me that it would ever tell the OS: "hey, I know i'm an always-on service but if you feel like it you can shut me off".

You can always manually enter sleep mode; all it does is tell the OS to "please don't do it". The game suggests to the OS it shouldn't - because - it's an always-on service.

[Adamo]

The server demanding that the system not go to sleep is a feature, not a bug, in this case. It's saying "Hey, you forgot about me!" It makes little sense to run a service that is actively expecting connections while putting the system to sleep. How would it then know when a new connection is incoming? This won't be stable for the game, anyway, without some serious engineering. A sleep process on a server, whether it's running Windows, linux, or whatever, that expects to sleep (why, again, is a server going to sleep?) while running a headless server should have a scripted shutdown process that understands to save and shutdown the factorio server before entering sleep mode, and then to bring it back up when it comes out of sleep.

[Optera]

Fair points.

So for the OPs scenario where the server should be down for the night he should run Factorio through windows taskmanager.
Start the task in the morning and use taskkill to shut it down in the evening.

Here's the batch script I used to kill currently running instances and start a fresh instance.

Code: Select all

@Echo Off
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq factorio.exe" | findstr "factorio.exe" >nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto StartFactorio
goto StopFactorio

:StopFactorio
REM Echo stopping current instance(s)
REM gracefully stop server
REM timeout /T 60

Echo killing current instance(s)
taskkill /IM factorio.exe /T /F
timeout /T 1

:StartFactorio
Echo starting Factorio
"./bin/x64/factorio.exe" --start-server "./saves/my-save.zip"

Using batch files and taskkill proved to work a lot more reliable than trying to control the executable directly through taskmanager.
I've been using this script to ensure only one instance of a certain program is freshly started since XP and it still works on 10. I'm sure you could do it more elegant with powershell, but I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

PS: If there is a command to save server state and quit that should be used before force killing the process with taskkill.

[BlueTemplar]

Note that while making the PC sleep while running a (paused) game of Factorio is not officially supported, I personally never had any issues with it.
(with non-headless Factorio, on Windows and Xubuntu. Meanwhile Ubuntu had issues.)

[antares14943]

Thanks for everyone's help so far. If I'm understanding right, 0.17 added a feature that tells the OS "don't sleep plz". Would it be possible to add a feature flag around this? Ideally I would like my server to sleep after the Factorio process is paused for N minutes. --allow_sleep_when_paused N maybe?

Use case is that my server is another windows 10 machine in my home. Running & cooling it costs money. My users are trained to send a WoL packet to the machine if they want to play. It's a handful of close, technically minded friends so it's manageable.

I could schedule a shutdown script to run. (Ty Optera!) It would be nice if there was a way to check for connected players & delay shutdown if players are connected. Is there a way to do that via an API or a script?

Thanks!