Stop and start a container

To stop and start a container you created before, e.g. to save costs and lessen the load on the backends, you need to do the following steps. Please note that stopping and starting actually removes the container and creates it again, only the database stays in place! That means that you keep all your data, deployed extensions etc., but anything on the file system will be gone. On a restart, the same steps as on the first start are taken, so all dlls, fonts etc. will be added again exactly as on the first start, but importing apps, fobs or rapidstart packages is skipped.

  1. When you create the container and check the logs, you will see that it says "This seeems to be a regular start"
  2. Right click on your container in the Containers list under the Repository of your app and choose Stop. After confirmation your container is stopped. You can identify a stopped container because it will have a grey icon.
  3. Right click on the stopped container and choose Start. The container will be started and the icon will turn to red until it becomes healthy. If you take a look at the logs again, you will no see the message "This seems to be a service restart".
  4. Also note that in a later stage during startup, the log shows "Skipping artifact import because this seems to be a service restart" when the container skips the import of an artifact that shouldn't be imported on restart

[!NOTE] Automated nightly consolidation: We're using an automated mechanism that automatically consolidates all running containers on as few resources as possible during the night. In the background containers are spread across different virtual machines where one machine runs many BC containers.

Example: Due to different stop times of containers it can happen, that in the worst case 12 virtual machines running with only 1 BC container each, although a single VM is capable of running much more.
The automated mechanism consolidates those containers so that only 1 virtual machine is needed for those 12 containers. #COSMOgoesgreen

The mechanism usually starts at 22pm CET and might make your container unavailable for around 10-15min during consolidation.