Auto-Pause & Auto-Stop

Empty Minecraft servers burn CPU doing nothing. DiscoPanel can handle idle servers two ways. Both are per-server settings in the properties tab.

Auto-Stop

Turn on Enable Auto-Stop and the server shuts down cleanly (world saved) after nobody has been online for a while. Two timers control it:

• Auto-Stop Timeout (Established): how long after the last player leaves. Default is one hour.
• Auto-Stop Timeout (Initial): how long after a start if nobody ever joins. Default is 30 minutes.

A stopped server has to be started from the panel again. Joining doesn’t start it.

Auto-Pause

Auto-pause freezes the server instead of stopping it. A frozen server uses no CPU at all but keeps its memory, so waking it up takes under a second.

The nice part is how waking works:

• Refreshing the server list does not wake it. DiscoPanel answers the ping itself, so the server still shows up as online with a “sleeping, join to wake” message.
• Actually joining wakes it. The player connects normally and usually doesn’t notice a thing.

Auto-pause needs the server to be behind the DiscoPanel proxy, because the proxy is what catches the join while the server is frozen. Servers with a directly exposed port should use Auto-Stop instead.

The timers work like Auto-Stop’s: Auto-Pause Timeout (Established) (default one hour after the last player leaves) and Auto-Pause Timeout (Initial) (default 10 minutes if nobody joins after a start).

Sleeping servers show a blue Sleeping badge in the panel, and you can still stop them normally from the UI.

Caution

A sleeping server does nothing at all. No autosaves, no scheduled in-game tasks, and farms don’t run. That’s the point, but keep it in mind.

You can enable both. The server pauses first, and if nobody comes back it eventually stops completely.