Spring Boot: How to schedule and execute tasks concurrently? - spring

What I want to is as follows:
In a Spring Boot application,
Schedule tasks (functions, or a method of a class) with cron expressions (cron expressions can be different for each task).
When it's time to run task, run it, concurrently with other task if neccessary (start time is the same, running periods overlaps etc.) - and without any limitation of the concurrency.
The tasks can take several minutes.
The number of tasks (and its options) and cron expressions cannot be determined at development time. It is end user configurable.
The scheduler must satisfy the following requirements.
It must not have a wait queue. if a scheduled time arrives, the task must be executed immediately (Don't worry about the number of the threads).
When the tasks are not running, the number of idle threads should be minimal - or the number should be controllable.
I've looked at ThreadPoolTaskScheduler, but it seems that it fails to satisfy the above requirements.
Thank you in advance.

Related

Problem with Quartz and Tasks Simultaneous

I have some problems with a project that includes Spring Framework and Quartz tasks. I have some tasks that starts each one minute and a have a loop with 3 companies (object Company) inside this loop.
Each company must starts one particular task simultaneously, but generally, these 3 taks have duration longer than one minute.
Then a need these 3 tasks continue executing simultaneously (3 threads at the same time), but each one must wait their similar tasks (new tasks after one minute) finish and then it starts again.
I'm using Spring and I'm using taskExecutor to start de new thread. I dont know if its the best way to call the job class.
I hope I was clear.

Spring Scheduling Quartz and thousands of jobs

According to the business logic of my Spring Boot application with Quartz Scheduling and MongoDB as Job persistent storage, every user of the system can create the postponed job that must be executed at some point in time. The user chooses the time when it must be executed.
Right now I'm thinking about the approach where every user will create a dedicated JobDetail for every postponed job, something like this:
schedulerFactoryBean.getScheduler().addJob(jobDetail(), true, true);
The issue I can potentially see here, that with this approach I can quickly create thousands of jobs in Quartz scheduler. Previously I never scheduled such amount of jobs in Spring Scheduling with Quartz and don't know how the system will handle it. Is it a good idea to implement the system in such way and will Spring Scheduling Quartz handle such amount of jobs without problems?
Yes, Quartz itself can handle thousands of jobs and triggers without any issues.
If you are going to have many jobs executing concurrently, just make sure that you configure Quartz with a sufficient number of worker threads. The number of worker threads should be typically equal to the maximum number of jobs that can be running concurrently + some small buffer (10% or so) just in case.
From what you write I assume that your jobs will be one-off jobs, i.e. each job will be executed only once. If that is the case, Quartz can automatically discard your jobs as soon as they finish executing unless your jobs are marked as durable. Quartz automatically removes non-durable jobs if they are not scheduled to run in the future. This feature may help you reduce the total number of registered jobs.
I hope this helps. If not, please ask.

Spring Boot, Cron job synchronization

In my Spring Boot application, based on the Cron job(runs every 5 minutes) I need to process 2000 products in my database.
Right now the process time of these 2000 products takes more than 5 minutes. I ran into the issue where the second Cron job runs when the first one is not completed yet.
Is there in Spring/Cron out of the box functionality that will allow to synchronize these jobs and wait for the previous job completion before starting the next one?
Please advise how to properly implement such kind of system. Anyway, the following technologies are also available Neo4j, MongoDB, Kafka. Please advise how to properly design/implement this functionality using the Spring/Cron separately or even together with the mentioned technologies.
1) You may try to use #Scheduled(fixedDelay = 5*60*1000). It will guarantee that next invocation will happen strictly in 5 minutes after previous one is finished. But this may break your scheduling requirements
2) You can limit the underlying ThreadExecutor's pool size to 1 thread, so next invocation will have to wait until previous is finished, but this, again, can break the logic, since it would affect all periodic tasks invoked by #Scheduled
3) You can use Quartz instead of spring's native #Scheduled. It's more complicated to configure, but allows to achieve the desired behaviour via #DisallowConcurrentExecution annotation or via setting JobDetail::isConcurrentExectionDisallowed in your job details

Heroku clock process: how to ensure jobs weren't skipped?

I'm building a Heroku app that relies on scheduled jobs. We were previously using Heroku Scheduler but clock processes seem more flexible and robust. So now we're using a clock process to enqueue background jobs at specific times/intervals.
Heroku's docs mention that clock dynos, as with all dynos, are restarted at least once per day--and this incurs the risk of a clock process skipping a scheduled job: "Since dynos are restarted at least once a day some logic will need to exist on startup of the clock process to ensure that a job interval wasn’t skipped during the dyno restart." (See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduled-jobs-custom-clock-processes)
What are some recommended ways to ensure that scheduled jobs aren't skipped, and to re-enqueue any jobs that were missed?
One possible way is to create a database record whenever a job is run/enqueued, and to check for the presence of expected records at regular intervals within the clock job. The biggest downside to this is that if there's a systemic problem with the clock dyno that causes it to be down for a significant period of time, then I can't do the polling every X hours to ensure that scheduled jobs were successfully run, since that polling happens within the clock dyno.
How have you dealt with the issue of clock dyno resiliency?
Thanks!
You will need to store data about jobs somewhere. On Heroku, you don't have any informations or warranty about your code being running only once and all the time (because of cycling)
You may use a project like this on (but not very used) : https://github.com/amitree/delayed_job_recurring
Or depending on your need you could create a scheduler or process which schedule jobs for the next 24 hours and is run every 4 hours in order to be sure your jobs will be scheduled. And hope that the heroku scheduler will work at least once every 24 hours.
And have at least 2 worker processing the jobs.
Though it requires human involvement, we have our scheduled jobs check-in with Honeybadger via an after_perform hook in rails
# frozen_string_literal: true
class ScheduledJob < ApplicationJob
after_perform do |job|
check_in(job)
end
private
def check_in(job)
token = Rails.application.config_for(:check_ins)[job.class.name.underscore]
Honeybadger.check_in(token) if token.present?
end
end
This way when we happen to have poorly timed restarts from deploys we at least know should-be scheduled work didn't actually happen
Would be interested to know if someone has a more fully-baked, simple solution!

how to implement custom cloud worker

I am designing a cloud app and need a worker process which scours my database looking for work, and then performs it.
Most of the info I seem to find on the subject of background tasks in the cloud involves some kind of scheduler and/or queuing system.
What I have doesn't quite fit into the "run this task every 5 minutes" or "add this to the queue to be executed later" models. I think the main difference to my problem is that the workers themselves find work to do, rather than being assigned it by a periodic scheduler or an external process that generates work.
What I have is basically a giant table where each entry has three fields:
job: a small task to be performed, lets say it gets the last message from a twitter account and stores it in the database
the interval at which to perform that job: say every 5 minutes, N.B. the interval is arbitrary and different for each entry in the table
the last date when the job was performed
The way I would implement this is to have a worker which has an infinite loop. When it enters the loop, it scours the database a)looking for items whose date + interval < currentTime, b)when it finds one, it sets date = currentTime, and c)then executes the job. If there is no work ATM, it sleep for a few seconds, then tries again.
I will have many parallel workers scouring the database simultaneously, which is why I do b) first and then c) in the paragraph above. Since there are parallel workers, action a) and b) are atomic operations on the database to prevent work being duplicated. If the worker crashes after a) and b), but before it manages to finish the work, it's no big deal, and the workers can just do it at the next interval; reason for this is that the work is not performed in a time-invariant system so a backlog scenario of failed jobs has no benefit as the tasks have to be performed at their exact intervals, so it's better to skip 1 interval than to have uneven intervals between which the tasks were executed.
My question is whether that is a reasonable implementation strategy? If so, how do I bring this process to life on the cloud (I am using Heroku, but may switch to EC2 in the future)? I still haven't written any code so I would welcome other suggestions (maybe I misunderstood the use cases/applications for queue systems).
This sounds so close to using something like a scheduled job that you might as well tread the well beaten path and do it the more conventional way. There's no reason why you can't schedule a job to run once every few seconds.
However, this idea of looking for work sounds dodgy. What happens if two workers find the same task to run at the same time for instance? Also, are there not triggers in the application which can indicate that work needs doing? It seems strange that you have code 'looking for work'.
You can go a very long way with simple periodic background tasks, so I would exhaust all possibilities in that area before rolling your own.

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