Can I run my processes 24x7x365? It is stated in Blue Prism documentation that every process should have a Stop Time, but why does it need to be stopped?

Can I run my processes 24x7x365? It is stated in Blue Prism documentation that every process should have a Stop Time, but why does it need to be stopped?

The subject of how long a Windows system of Server and Client operating systems can be left running is a topic of much discussion. Everybody will have a slightly different opinion on the subject

Our opinion is that if your operating systems are exclusively server operating systems, and they are relatively recent versions, then the regularity with which they will need to be rebooted is only subject to the frequency of failure or of applying patches.

If you are using client operating systems as part of your Blue Prism infrastructure then these were not designed to be running continuously. That is not to say that they couldn't do so, but it will depend on a number of factors, particularly the amount of resources in use by applications and services, and by the design of the software which is running on the clients.

None of these factors are under the control of the Blue Prism software, however, Therefore, as we cannot control the factors in these environments, it has always been our recommendation to treat the reboot frequency in the same way as a user would. In other words, whereas you might not reboot a server unless it is required, a client operating system may be rebooted more frequently, because that is how a user would work with it.

For this reason, as Processes are usually intended to be deployed on client operating systems, we state that every Process should have a Stop Time. This allows for the recovery of memory resources by the underlying operating system. 

If your clients are provisioned with more memory resources than they need to do any combination of tasks simultaneously, then this may not be an issue for you, and so you may decide that this edict is not applicable for your situation. However, we tend to find that most of our customers provision client resources to the bare minimum necessary, and so we would recommend that the system is allowed to recover from continuous processing once in a while such that the operating system can manage its resources during the quiet period, as it was designed to do.