Auto-Restart: Crash Watchdog for Every Game

Auto-Restart is the LoafPanel crash watchdog. It watches your server’s live console output, and when it sees one of the crash signatures your game ships with, it restarts the server for you — no manual click, no waiting for a player to message you that the server is down. The watchdog is available on every game in the panel. This guide explains exactly what it does, where to find it, and what each setting means: turning it on, the difference between Live and Test mode, the optional delay before a restart fires, the cooldown and per-hour rate limit that keep it from restarting in a loop, the notifications you can receive, and the recent-events log that shows you everything it has done.

What the Auto-Restart Watchdog Does

The watchdog reads the last lines of your server’s console on a tight cadence and compares each new line against a list of crash signatures — short text patterns that identify a known crash or fatal error for your game. When a line matches, the watchdog issues a restart through the same power control the panel uses everywhere else, so your server comes back up on its own. It is a signature-based watcher, not a blind “is it offline?” ping: it acts on the specific log lines your game is known to print when it crashes. Today the shipped signature sets cover Arma Reforger — the first game we built signatures for — so that is where the watchdog actively restarts right now; other games show the same page but have nothing to match until signatures are added (covered in the last section).

Note: The watchdog matches lines in your live console output, not a generic uptime ping

Note: A restart is the standard panel restart — your server stops and boots straight back up

Note: The first time the watchdog looks at a server it only notes where the log is up to; it will not restart on old lines it has never seen before

Where to Find Auto-Restart in the Panel

Open your server, then go to the Settings page. Auto-Restart is the rightmost tab, after SFTP — click it to swap the panel content the same way the General, Startup, Config, and SFTP tabs do. If you prefer a direct link, the standalone address /server/<your-server>/auto-restart still works and lands on the same page. The page shows the watchdog’s on/off state, the mode and limits, the notification choices, a read-only list of the crash signatures your game ships with, and a log of recent events.

Tip: Auto-Restart lives on the server Settings page as the last tab, next to SFTP

Tip: Bookmark the direct /auto-restart link for a server you tune often

Tip: Changing your sub-users? Editing these settings needs the Startup permission, and the events log needs the Activity permission

Turning It On: Live vs Test Mode

Auto-Restart has two modes. In Live mode a matched crash signature actually restarts the server. In Test mode (dry-run) the watchdog does everything except the restart — it records that it would have restarted, but leaves your server untouched. Test mode is the safe way to confirm the signatures are catching real crashes on your particular server before you let the watchdog act. New servers start with the watchdog enabled in Live mode by default, and there is a simple on/off toggle if you want to switch the whole feature off.

Note: Live mode restarts on a match; Test mode logs the match but does not restart

Tip: Run Test mode for a day after a big modlist or config change to see what the watchdog catches before going Live

Tip: Toggling the watchdog off stops all of it — no scanning, no restarts, no log entries

Restart Delay, Cooldown, and the Per-Hour Rate Limit

Before any of the limits below, there is an optional delay before restart. When the watchdog matches a crash, it can wait a set number of seconds before it actually issues the restart — useful for giving a hung server a moment to recover on its own and for letting you see the crash land in the console first. The delay can be set from 0 seconds up to 1 hour (3600 seconds) and defaults to 0, which means restart immediately.

Two limits stop the watchdog from restarting your server over and over. The cooldown is the minimum gap between automatic restarts: if a crash signature matches within the cooldown window of the last restart, the watchdog skips it and writes a “skipped — cooldown” entry instead of restarting again. The cooldown can be set from 30 seconds up to 1 hour (3600 seconds) and defaults to 5 minutes. The per-hour rate limit is the hard cap on automatic restarts in any one-hour window, from 1 to 30 restarts, defaulting to 6. If your server hits that cap, the watchdog pauses itself on that server for one hour rather than fighting a crash loop it can’t fix, and logs a “rate limit — paused” entry. Re-enabling the watchdog (saving the page with the toggle on) clears a rate-limit pause immediately so you can resume once you have fixed the underlying problem.

Note: Restart delay defaults to 0 (restart immediately); the range is 0 seconds to 1 hour

Note: Cooldown default is 5 minutes; the range is 30 seconds to 1 hour

Note: The rate limit default is 6 restarts per hour; the range is 1 to 30

Tip: A server that keeps hitting the rate limit has a problem a restart won’t fix — check the console or your mods before raising the cap

Notifications and the Events Log

The watchdog can let you know when it acts. Notify on trigger sends you a panel notification whenever an auto-restart fires, naming the server and the reason it matched. Notify on pause sends a notification when the watchdog pauses a server after hitting the rate limit, so a crash loop never goes unnoticed. Both notifications are on by default and can be turned off independently. These are in-panel notifications; whether they also reach you by email or Discord follows your account’s notification preferences. Below the settings, the recent-events log lists what the watchdog has done — restarts, matches skipped by cooldown or rate limit, Test-mode matches, pauses, and any restart that failed — newest first, so you have a clear history without digging through raw console logs.

Tip: Leave “Notify on pause” on even if you silence the trigger notification — it’s how you find out about a crash loop

Tip: The events log is the quickest way to confirm the watchdog is doing its job after you switch from Test to Live

Note: A failed restart attempt is recorded too, so you can tell the difference between “didn’t fire” and “tried and couldn’t”

Crash Signatures Are Set Per Game

The list of crash signatures the watchdog matches against belongs to your game, not to your individual server. They are shown on the Auto-Restart page as a read-only list — each with a short description, a severity label, and whether it matches as plain text or a regular expression — but they are not editable from the server page, because a bad pattern would affect every server on that game. Our team maintains the signature set for each game. This is also why the watchdog is “available for every game” but only acts where signatures exist: on a game that doesn’t ship crash signatures yet, the page shows a “no patterns yet” notice and the watchdog stays quietly idle until signatures are added, at which point it starts working automatically with no action from you. Some signatures are informational only — they are recorded in the events log to give you visibility but never trigger a restart.

Note: Crash signatures are maintained per game and shown read-only on your server

Note: If your game shows “no patterns yet,” the watchdog is on but has nothing to match — it will activate on its own once signatures exist

Tip: Need a signature added for a crash you keep seeing? Send us the exact console line — that’s what we turn into a pattern