Stop, start, and restart an instance

Stop an hourly instance between work sessions, and its plan stops being billed while its workspace waits for you. Start it again to carry on where you left off, or restart it to get a fresh container in one step. While it runs, you open its app with Launch App.

Before you begin

• An instance in a TIR project. See Create an instance.
• Permission to update instances in the project. Every project role except MEMBER has it, and a MEMBER needs a policy that allows updates.

Every action is in the instance’s actions menu, on its row in Manage Instances and on its details page. The details page also has Start and Stop buttons next to the app button.

Whichever action you take, files in the workspace at /home/jovyan and data on mounted datasets and file systems are kept. Packages you installed yourself are lost, so install them again afterwards. For the full picture, see Where your files live.

How an instance moves between statuses

Diagram as text

stateDiagram-v2
    state "Saving Image" as SavingImage
    [*] --> Waiting: Create
    Waiting --> Running: Container ready
    Running --> Stopping: Stop Instance
    Waiting --> Stopping: Stop Instance
    Stopping --> Stopped
    Stopped --> Waiting: Start Instance
    Running --> Waiting: Restart Instance
    Running --> SavingImage: Save Image
    SavingImage --> Running: Image saved

An instance’s status says where it is:

Status	What it means
Waiting	The container is starting: TIR is finding a host, the host is downloading the image, or the image is starting up
Running	The container is up, and you can open the app and connect over SSH
Stopping	A stop is in progress
Stopped	The container is gone, and the workspace waits for the next start
Saving Image	TIR is saving an image of the instance, and other actions wait until it finishes
Pending	The instance is waiting for capacity, which is rare
Error	The container is gone, and only support can recover the instance

Stop Instance moves a Running or Waiting instance to Stopping and then Stopped. Start Instance takes a Stopped instance back through Waiting to Running. Restart Instance sends a Running instance back to Waiting until its new container is ready. After a save, the instance shows Running again on its own.

Open the instance’s app

Launch App opens the instance’s app, JupyterLab, ComfyUI, or FramePack depending on the image, in a new browser tab. You find it in the actions menu, at the top of the instance’s page, and under App URL in Manage Instances.

The app opens only while the instance is Running. An image with no app, such as a Base OS image, has no App URL, so connect to that instance over SSH instead. See Connect to an instance over SSH.

If your browser blocks the new tab, allow pop-ups for TIR and select Launch App again.

Stop an instance

You can stop an hourly instance, or an instance on a private cluster, while it is Running or Waiting. A committed instance runs for its whole term, and its plan is already paid for that term, so its menu has no Stop Instance. See Billing options.

If your instance’s plan includes local NVMe storage, shown as Local NVMe Storage under Plan Details on the Overview tab, it is mounted at /mnt/local. Stopping the instance deletes everything in it, and the stop dialog warns you about it. Copy anything you need into /home/jovyan before you stop the instance. A private cluster’s local volume is kept when you stop.

1. In the instance’s actions menu, select Stop Instance.
2. Tick the box that confirms you want to stop the instance, and select Stop.

The instance shows Stopping, then Stopped.

Plan billing stops once the instance stops. Workspace above 30 GB is still billed until you delete the instance, and datasets, SFS, PFS, and reserved IPs are billed by their own products. See pricing.

A Python virtual environment or conda environment that you create under /home/jovyan is kept with the rest of the workspace. Activate it by its path, or from a start script, after each start.

The instance gives back its floating public IP and its egress IP, which is the address its outbound traffic comes from. On start, it gets addresses from E2E’s pool, which can be different ones. A reserved IP keeps its address. See Manage IP addresses on an instance.

Start an instance

Start Instance is available when the instance is Stopped. Select it, then confirm. Plan billing starts again when it reaches Running, and its start scripts run each time it starts.

TIR checks your credit and its capacity before it starts the instance:

• On a prepaid account, your balance must cover at least one hour of the instance’s plan.
• When the plan is out of capacity, the start is refused with “Inventory temporarily unavailable. Please try again after some time.” Try again later, or change the plan of the instance to one that is in stock. A plan change on a stopped instance also starts it.

TIR checks a public image again at each start, and starts the instance only while the image is still valid. For a custom or public image, TIR asks the registry for the image at each start and downloads only what the host is missing. A large image can keep the instance on Waiting for longer.

If the start is refused or the instance stays on Waiting, see Troubleshooting TIR Instances, which covers a Spot Instance that TIR took back and what keeps an instance waiting.

Restart an instance

A restart replaces the instance’s container with a fresh one from its image. Use it to get a clean container, free GPU memory held by leftover processes, or run your start scripts again after you change one. Restart Instance is available while the instance is Running or Waiting, on hourly and committed instances alike. To bring back a stopped instance, start it instead.

A restart ends every process in the instance at once, so save your work to /home/jovyan first.

1. In the instance’s actions menu, select Restart Instance.
2. Confirm the restart. The dialog reminds you to install your own packages again afterwards.

Once the new container is ready, the instance is Running again. After the restart:

• Files in /home/jovyan, mounted datasets and file systems, and /mnt/local are kept.
• Everything else in the container returns to the image’s contents, including packages you installed.
• The instance’s start scripts run again.
• An hourly plan’s billing pauses while the instance shows Waiting and starts again when it is Running. The workspace is billed throughout.

To keep packages across restarts, install them from a start script, save the instance as an image, or use a custom image that has them. See Run start scripts on an instance and Save an instance as an image.

When an instance restarts on its own

TIR replaces the container, with the same result as a restart, when:

• The instance runs out of memory.
• The instance fills its ephemeral storage: the space outside /home/jovyan and its mounts, whose size the plan sets and whose contents are lost on restart.
• You change the mounts or the image of a running instance. A plan change, made on a stopped instance, starts it on a new container in the same way.

To find out why an instance restarted, look at Instances Event and Logs while it is running, and at Ephemeral Storage and RAM Utilization on Monitoring. An alert on ephemeral storage or memory use warns you before the instance runs out. See Monitor an instance and Troubleshooting TIR Instances.

To give a stopped instance a different plan, see Change the plan of an instance. When you are finished with the instance, delete it to stop billing for its workspace too.

These actions are also available through the TIR API’s Start-Stop/Attach-Detach ReserveIp operation.