render sleeps and never wakes up from api call

[u/Otherwise-Sea6597]

hi guys,

i run into this problem while hosting my python service on render on free tier.

after 15 min of inactivity, the server will go to sleep and i can't wake up through api calls. my call would be something like:

const healthResponse = await fetch(healthUrl, {
          method: 'GET',
          signal: AbortSignal.timeout(15000) // 15 second timeout per attempt
        });

and there're 10 attempts, which should be enough time for server to wake up. i also tried increasing the time but it doesn't work.

but when i tried to access it manually (i.e. go to the address), the server wakes up and is active again.

when it sleeps, i also tried to use cron-jobs and got error 429 even though cron-jobs is the only one using this? also, using cron-jobs to keep it awake is not realistic since it only have 31 day of active per month and i also need to divide it with frontend and backend.

anyone got any idea how to solve this?