Running multiple instances of sonarr side by side

Help & Support
1

Sonarr version (exact version): latest develop
OS: windows 2008 r2
Description of issue: I realise that this is a niche case but I run two I stances of sonarr side by side.

One (for adult TV) configured and set up as a service through the /I option with the installer.

And…

One (for kids TV) configured to run on a different port using nssm.exe as a wrapper to run the startup nzbdrone.console.exe using the option to specifiy a data directory for the database.

All runs fine until one of them tries to automatically update the version and then they shit all over each other, until they both stop, nether gets updated. If I run each instance individually and update to the latest version then run them both again side by side they will work fine until the next automatic update.

Is there a way to get two instances of sonarr running side by side on the same server and have them play nice with each other?

2

Irrelevant in this case, but there is a reason we ask for the exact version…

Multiple instances of Sonarr on the same machine is not supported at this time. We don’t have short term plans to support that.

If you’re running the same binaries (from the same directory) for both you could try to separate that, though no idea if that will work better in your case.

Why run two instances instead of having both in one?

3

Essentially I have so many kids programs configured to be monitored and they are uploaded so irregularly that I moved all the kids programs to their own instance so that I can ensure that I am getting all of the adult TV and worry less about the kids TV.

If they are combined in the same instance then the ammount of kids TV makes many of the screens (Calendar, Series List) difficult to read due to the large ammounts of RED all over them.

My set up is…

Two seperate directories…

C:\Sonarr
C:\SonarrKids

I then run the following commands (via nssm launching them as a service)
c:\sonarr\sonarr.console.exe /data=c:\sonarr\data
c:\sonarrkids\sonarr.console.exe /data=c:\sonarrkids\data

Everything works fine until one of them attempts to update to a newer version. I appreciate that it is unsupported and what I want to do is a particularly niche case so if its not possible or you have no clue then its no big issue for me. I certainly dont expect you to change anything to enable it to work, it was more a case of can you think of any reason they would be interacting even though they are running different exe in different locations pointing to different dbs?

4

Would it be a crazy idea to use docker?

5

I think the issue is the updater making sure Sonarr is shutdown before starting, which kills any process with that name.

6

Docker would work as a separation layer but not having docker installed at the moment I didnt really want to go down that route just yet. Thanks for the suggestion.

Not something I can easily work around then :frowning: Ahh well, never mind.

Is there a way to stop the auto update so I can at least control the updates myself?

7

No, under Windows you can’t opt out of auto updates, you may be able to work around it by not giving write access to the folder, but no guarantee if/how that’d work.

8

I have the same issue of needing multiple copies. I just with they would add one more field to the database so it could support it. trying to manage documentaries foreign tv and local tv that is stored in separate drives from one sonar is just not convenient.

9

In the end I managed to do this comfortably by wrapping both instances in NSSM, ensuring that neither are called Sonarr as the service name.

Then on top of that I wrote some powershell that will download and apply any updates directly from git on a daily basis.

Its a hack, it clumsy but it works with no issues.

10

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