# EmonPi needs periodic restarting

**URL:** <https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/emonpi-needs-periodic-restarting/3812>\
**Category:** Hardware\
**Tags:** threadisdead, emonpi, emonhub\
**Created:** [24 April 2017 12:46 UTC](https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/emonpi-needs-periodic-restarting/3812 "2017-04-24T12:46:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 9

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**Author:** ![TrystanLea](https://community.openenergymonitor.org/user_avatar/community.openenergymonitor.org/trystanlea/32/31_2.png) [@TrystanLea](https://community.openenergymonitor.org/u/TrystanLea)\
**Post date:** [6 June 2017 08:17 UTC](https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/emonpi-needs-periodic-restarting/3812/9 "2017-06-06T08:17:53Z")

</div>

Hello @Csaba_Zagoni, @Dave @Jon

I’ve been trying to think of a better way to catch the moment that the “thread is dead” problem occurs while also providing automatic recovery.

I think that rather than continue to print the “thread is dead” error message we can force emonhub to close down and then have a watchdog script restart emonhub while saving the last 100 lines of the emonhub log to a dedicated crash log.

For those happy to make modifications via terminal I have outlined the steps to do this below, @Dave it would be great if you could try this. @Csaba_Zagoni I have sent you a PM I would be happy to help you with this if you can give me remote access. If this provides a solution and improved logging of “thread is dead” events from which we can further debug the root cause of the issue then we can push this out as a general update.

* * *

Implementation steps:

Open to edit emonhub.py:

```
sudo nano /home/pi/emonhub/src/emonhub.py

```

Navigate to line 140 and add “self.\_exit = True” below the printing of the “thread is dead” error as so:

```
if not I.isAlive():
    self._log.warning(I.name + " thread is dead") # had to be restarted")
    self._exit = True

```

If you cant find this point this link might help:

> <https://github.com/openenergymonitor/emonhub/blob/emon-pi/src/emonhub.py#L140>

Restart emonhub at this point

```
sudo service emonhub restart

```

We can then add a watchdog that checks if emonhub is running and in the case that it is not restart it.

To create this basic watchdog, create a file watchdog.sh in /home/pi:

```
rpi-rw
cd
nano watchdog.sh

```

Paste the following content into that file:

```
#!/bin/bash
TEST=$( ps aux | grep "python /usr/share/emonhub/emonhub.py --config-file /home/pi/data/emonhub.conf" | wc -l )

LOG=$(tail -n 100 /var/log/emonhub/emonhub.log)

if [$TEST -lt 2]; then
    echo "Emonhub is down, restarting!"
    sudo service emonhub restart

    echo "Last 100 lines of emonhub.log:"
    echo "$LOG"
fi

```

Save and exit

Make it excutable with:

```
sudo chmod +x watchdog.sh

```

Then finally add to crontab with:

```
sudo crontab -e

```

crontab entry:

```
* * * * * /home/pi/watchdog.sh >> /home/pi/data/watchdog.log 2>&1
```

---

_[View the full topic](https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/emonpi-needs-periodic-restarting/3812)._