How in the Tech

Keep an App Always Running with CPR .. er CRP

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 9, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Windows

CRP, not to be confused with CPR, stands for Control Running Programs is a small utility for Windows that serves just two purposes. First, CRP re-launches defined applications should they stop running, either by an application crash or an accidental closure. Second, and  very much in conjunction with the first, CRP limits the number of running instances of a configured application – even going so far as to prevent a single instance.

In my daily life, I have a client/server application that I use to keep a few XML files in sync across a remote network. The server portion is buggy however and at times will crash in the middle of synchronization with the client. It is highly inconvenient to connect to the remote server and relaunch the server daemon. With CRP properly configured, I can have the daemon re-launched soon after crash, where I can then resume the file sync. Why may this  be useful for you? There are many inconsistent applications out there when it comes to the behavior of the close button. Some will close out the program in question, logically, while others actually minimize the application to the tray. CRP can help consolidate that behavior to something you’d expect. We’ve probably all closed out our IM program on accident – thinking we minimized it to the tray instead.

The main downside to this free program is it’s requirement for Microsoft’s .NET 2.0 framework. While typically this isn’t an automatic negative, with a small lightweight executable such as CRP the linking of the .NET libraries at runtime cause the application to use a fair bit of system memory – about 10MB in this case. It’s certainly not system chugging worthy, but it is something that bears mentioning. Still, it’s a minimal price to pay for my usage and maybe yours.

*Vista users may find they have to run the application with administrative rights.