Recordings interrupted in Windows when account locked

[bjhardcastle]

Hi all,
We've had a few instances of mid-experiment events affecting Open Ephys on Win 10.

It seems to be caused by anything that kicks out the currently logged-in user and requires logging back in, for example at the end of a Remote Desktop Connection session, or a power-saving sleep timeout.

After logging back in:

• GUI is still open and appears to be recording (red toolbar)
• all channel timeseries are flat lines
• acquisition files no longer increasing in size

We're trying to identify and prevent such events, but I was wondering

• is it clear to anyone why this happens?
• could we, or the GUI, do anything that's sure to prevent the problematic event?
• could recordings be made robust to these events?

[medengineer]

Hi,

Sounds like the GUI’s device acquisition / disk writing threads are getting paused/suspended on user logout but the UI thread manages to hang on. From a security perspective this makes sense since a logged-out user shouldn’t have access to device/disk buses. Therefore, I don’t believe we can circumvent this behavior in the GUI code directly.

Preventing the computer from going to sleep should be straightforward via Control Panel > System > Power > Sleep > Never or a third-party tool such as Caffeine.