Laravel Scheduling in clustered environment - laravel

Question

I am working with scheduling in Laravel 5.3. Previously, I was using one server to host the laravel application. Now that I am using two servers to run the Laravel App, how do I ensure that both servers are not running the same jobs at the same time?
Recently, I saw an Event method called "withoutOverlapping()". See https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/scheduling#preventing-task-overlaps
In my case, withoutOverlapping() cannot help me as I am working in a clustered environment.
Are there any workarounds or suggestions regarding this?

Answer 1

First of all, define if it is critical or not to avoid running task multiple times.
For example, if your app is using a task to do some sort of cleanup, there is almost no drawback to run it on every server (who care if you try to delete messages with +10 min twice?)
If it is absolutely critical to run every task only one time, you'll need to define a "main server" that will execute tasks, and a slave server that will just answer to requests but not perform any task. This is quite trivial as you just have to give every env a different name in your .env, and test against that when you define the scheduler tasks.
This is the easiest way, seriously don't bother making a database locking mecanism or whatever so you can synchronise tasks accross servers. Even OS's struggle to manage properly synchronisation against threads on the same machine, why do you want to implement the same accross different machines?

Answer 2

Here's what I've done when I ran into the same problems with load balancing:
class MutexCommand extends Command {
private $hash = null;
public function cleanup() {
if (is_string($this->hash)) {
Redis::del($this->hash);
$this->hash = null;
}
}
protected abstract function generateHash();
protected abstract function handleInternal();
public final function handle() {
register_shutdown_function([$this,"cleanup"]);
try {
$this->hash = $this->generateHash();
//Set a value if it does not exist atomically. Will fail if it does exist.
//Essentially setnx is the mechanism to acquire the lock
if (!Redis::setnx($this->hash,true)) {
$this->hash = null; //Prevent it from being cleaned up
throw new Exception("Already running");
}
$this->handleInternal();
} finally {
$this->cleanup();
}
}
}
Then you can write your commands:
class ThisShouldNotOverlap extends MutexCommand {
public function generateHash() {
return "Unique key for mutex, you can just use the class name if you want by doing return static::class";
}
public function handleInternal() { /* do stuff */ }
}
Then whenever you try to run the same command on multiple instances one would successfully acquire the "lock" and the others should fail.
Of course this assumes that you are using a non-clustered redis cache.
If you are not using redis then there's probably similar locking mechanisms you can implement in other caches, if you are using a clustered redis then you may need to use the RedLock locking mechanism

Answer 3

Essentially no, there's no a natural way using Laravel to know if another Laravel app have the same job on the job dispatcher.
We have some options there to find a solution:
Create a intermediate app that manages the jobs from the other apps.
Allow only one app to dispatch jobs.
Use worker queues, you have some packages for this, I would recommend to use Laravel 5 with WebSockets and Queue Asynchronously.

Answer 4

First of all Laravel scheduler isn't designed to work in a clustered environment. It was never intended to be that way.
I would suggest you should have a dedicated cron instance which manages your Laravel scheduler jobs.