I have it running constantly in the background.
Since beta 8 I am seeing an issue where the application is no longer running. I think it might have crashed
Another issue I had was that in one instance it kept getting 502 errors (too many connections). although the actual number of connections was fine. I think it might have been keeping other connections up without closing the old ones, causing this issue with Astra (never had issues like that with them before). Closing and restarting NBP fixed it.