Hey @Philip_Walton,
Thanks for the detailed timeline, it made this easy to trace. Yes, those pauses are the computer going to sleep, and it’s expected behavior rather than a fault. When no Bot is working on it and no app is actively using it, the computer is paused a few minutes later with its memory and disk saved, then resumes exactly where it left off the next time something needs it. Programs running inside the computer (your WhatsApp sync, the watchdog, the rclone mount and cron) don’t count as activity, so they freeze along with it. That’s why nothing crashed, there was no reboot, and the clock jumped.
Your timeline matches this. On Oct 20 the computer went to sleep at about 17:15 UTC and stayed asleep until about 02:50 UTC, when one of your daily scheduled Bots was due and woke it. The shorter pauses follow the same cycle: it wakes for a scheduled run, a message or opening the app, then goes back to sleep a few minutes after the work ends. Keeping your Mac awake generally doesn’t change this, because an open app on an unattended Mac doesn’t count as active use.
It isn’t related to the Oct 17 move: the computer slept the same way before and after it. The overnight gaps likely got longer from Oct 19 because there were fewer scheduled Bot runs overnight to wake it.
There’s no way to keep the computer running 24/7 today. Keeping it awake while background work runs is something the team is looking at. In the meantime:
- Move overnight work into scheduled Bots rather than cron jobs or daemons inside the computer. Each scheduled run wakes the computer, does its work, and lets it sleep afterwards.
- For anything that has to survive a pause, make it resume cleanly: on wake, check how much time has passed and catch up, and have the rclone mount and other long-lived connections reconnect, since network connections drop while the computer sleeps.
- A command a Bot starts in its own shell should keep the computer awake for a while (up to about 30 minutes), which can cover short jobs but not an all-night process.
There’s no need to Reset, Recover or Update. None of them change this behavior.
This is the same situation as this earlier thread, if you’d like to follow along there.