Schedule job time shifting every day
When scheduling a cron job daily, the starting hour is shifting a little bit every day. It means that eventually, we'll get a day skipped from 23:59 to 00:01, 2 days later.
It can be a problem e.g. for membership schedule reminders where we check for all membership that correspond to the today's date. Some schedule reminders won't be sent.
Activity
Some previous discussion on this, for which there is only a workaround provided, which imho is far from ideal:
https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/8091/can-i-set-a-daily-scheduled-job-to-run-at-a-specific-time-of-daySome of the things we discussed:
- The Scheduled Job config form has a next-sched date/time. We should be able to set it so that it runs at a specific time (for daily/weekly/monthly jobs).
- It might have challenges, because jobs don't run at an exact time, so let's say it should run at 1:00 AM daily, and it ends up running at 2018-10-01 01:15, then the next-scheduled time should be 2018-10-02 01:00.
- We want to avoid existing issues with Scheduled Job, where if it drifts around 23:59, cron runs at 00:15, then it will have ended up skipping a day. -- we might want to warn against setting a time such as after 23:00.
Other background: CiviCRM has a 'cleanup' Scheduled Job that runs daily. It ends up drifting to day-time, where it then randomly flushes the cache, which affects the quickform session cache, meaning that people in the middle of an event registration, or a contribution, will encounter a fatal error ("you must accept cookies")
Putting this here for reference: https://github.com/konadave/com.klangsoft.flexiblejobs
I haven't used it but it might a) do what you want, or b) be something to build on
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Some concerns:
- A job might crash/fatal while it's running, causing the other jobs not to run.
- Multi-process: if a mailing is running for 1h, the system can still run other jobs in parallel (ex: so that mailings don't delay the processing of recurring contributions or scheduled reminders). On smaller systems, avoiding that might be a good feature, however, but right now, nothing stops multiple job processes to run at the same time.
On calculating minutes to stop the drift, I think it makes sense to do similar to what you're proposing:
- daily jobs: concat("current day", "time set in the config settings")
- hourly jobs: concat("current day", "current hour", ":00")
added needs:concept approval triaged type:proposal labels
Hi,
Thank you for raising an issue to help improve CiviCRM. We're sorry about this, but this particular issue has gone unnoticed for quite some time.
We would like to ask you to help us out and determine whether this issue should be kept open:
- If this issue is reporting a bug, can you attempt to reproduce on the latest version of CiviCRM?
- If this issue is proposing a new feature, can you verify whether the feature proposal is still relevant? Did it get the concept-approved label? Have other people also shown interest? Could it be implemented as an extension?
If yes,
- Is it something that you could help implement, either by sending a patch or hiring someone who can?
- Would you be willing to fund the work, either through a CiviCRM partner, or the Core Team?
Please feel free to comment or re-open the issue. We understand that automatic responses are annoying, but as the project evolves, we need a bit of help to triage and prioritise the most relevant issues.
Thank you for your help
P.S. This is an automated message. See
infra/gitlabissue 20.For reference, https://civicrm.org/extensions/cron-plus seems to do what we need here so I won't push this any further.
