Is the Google Tag Manager container automatically refreshed? If so, how/where?

Question

I'm not clear on if the Google Tag Manager Container is automatically refreshed, and if so how.

The documentation states:

By default, your container becomes eligible to be refreshed every 12 hours. To manually refresh the container, use ContainerHolder.refresh():

ContainerHolderSingleton.getContainerHolder().refresh();

This is an asynchronous call that will not return immediately. To reduce network traffic, refresh() may only be called once every 15 minutes, otherwise it will be a no-op.

It's the "becomes eligible to be refreshed every 12 hours" paired with the "To manually refresh" part that is tripping me up. As such I have two questions:

1. Does Google Tag Manager attempt to refresh the Container every 12 hours?
2. If the answer to #1 is yes then where/how does this occur?

My assumption at this point is that the answer to #1 is "Yes".

My concern is that I'm not sure where this automatic refresh occurs and I only access the getContainer() in the ContainerAvailableListener and then cache the values. So if it's the getContainer() call that triggers the update, like happens with the "swapping" of a new container, my implementation might not be refreshing.

Edit: My reason for asking is that the lifetime of my application can be quite long. I'm trying to determine if I need to manage container refreshes in my code or not.

Exuviae

Answer 1

I had a similar experience. When I updated the tags in Tag Manager, I didn’t see any results in Google Analytics. But the problem was that people simply open the service in a browser tab and they can have it open for several days without reloading the page. In yours (as in my case), you just need to wait until all users update/reload/restart the application or site. Because in order to implement a forced update of the container, you still need to deliver the source code to users that would do it. And here we return to the beginning of the problem.

Hymenium