Oozie Behavior with misaligned start - hadoop

I noticed that if I start an Oozie coordinator with a start time many "iterations" (in terms of the frequency) previous to the current time, then the coordinator would sequentially run workflows several times, ignoring the assigned frequency. However, for me it is more important that the workflow/action run itself at the assigned frequency, than it is for workflow/action to have run the correct number of times at a given point.
Is there any way I can avoid this behavior? One way would obviously be to ensure the start time is correct within an iteration time (is there a way to have it automatically take the start time?). Another would be to configure it to avoid this behavior altogether, and basically run at the next time when it should have given the start time and the frequency.

The obvious way to avoid side effects from "past" start dates is... to set the actual start date at submission time as "now".
That's the way we do it in my team:
on the local filesystem, write down a "Coord-template.xml" with a
placeholder such as start="%Now%"
just before submitting, generate the actual "Coordinator.xml" with
sed "s/%Now%/$(date --utc '+%FT%TZ')/" coord-template.xml > coordinator.xml
upload the coordinator definition to HDFS then submit it via Oozie CLI
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aternative: if you are using "basic" frequency (not CRON-like scheduling) you may want to try these <controls> to have Oozie create executions for all "past" time slots but discard them immediately :
<throttle>1</throttle>
and/or
<execution>LAST_ONLY</execution>
cf. Oozie 4.x reference
The rules would also apply in case the Coordinator is suspended then resumed, or in case the Oozie service gets stopped then restarted, or in case YARN has to queue new jobs for a really long time (because the cluster is 100% busy).

Oozie has improved of late, so there's an easier solution available than the currently accepted answer. As of Oozie 4.1, there is a "NONE" execution available. This skips iterations which occur in the past, more or less. Here's the doc snippet:
NONE: Similar to LAST_ONLY except all older materializations are skipped. When NONE is set, an action that is WAITING or READY will be SKIPPED when the current time is more than a certain configured number of minutes (tolerance) past the action's nominal time. By default, the threshold is 1 minute. For example, suppose action 1 and 2 are both WAITING , the current time is 5:20pm, and both actions' nominal times are before 5:19pm. Both actions will become SKIPPED, assuming they don't transition to SUBMITTED (or a terminal state) before then. Another way of thinking about this is to view it as similar to setting the timeout equal to 1 minute which is the smallest time unit, except that the SKIPPED status doesn't cause the coordinator job to eventually become DONEWITHERROR and can actually become SUCCEEDED (i.e. it's a "good" version of TIMEDOUT ).
Oozie 4.1 doc
I have tested this, and it does work with CRON frequencies. It is superior to the LAST_ONLY execution in your case because LAST_ONLY will still run the most recent iteration in the past (with the misaligned time), in addition to current/future iterations.
<execution>NONE</execution>

Related

How does Laravels task scheduling work without persisting the last completed date?

Laravel is (correctly) running scheduled tasks via the App\Console\Kernel#schedule method. It does this without the need for a persistance layer. Previously ran scheduled tasks aren't saved to the database or stored in anyway.
How is this "magic" achieved? I want to have a deeper understanding.
I have looked through the source, and I can see it is somewhat achieved by rounding down the current date and diffing that to the schedule frequency, along with the fact that it is required to run every minute, it can say with a certain level of confidence that it should run a task. That is my interpretation, but I still can't fully grasp how it is guaranteeing to run on schedule and how it handles failure or things being off by a few seconds.
EDIT Edit due to clarity issue pointed out in comment.
By "a few seconds" I mean how does the "round down" method work, even when it is ran every minute, but not at the same second - example: first run 00:01.00, 00:01:02, 00:02:04
Maybe to clarify further, and to assist in understanding how it works, is there any boundary guarantees on how it functions? If ran multiple times per minute will it execute per minute tasks multiple times in the minute?
Cronjob can not guarantee seconds precisely. That is why generally no cronjob interval is less than a minute. So, in reality, it doesn't handle "things being off by a few seconds."
What happens in laravel is this, after running scheduling command for the first time the server asks "Is there a queued job?" every minute. If none, it doesn't do anything.
For example, take the "daily" cronjob. Scheduler doesn't need to know when was the last time it ran the task or something like this. When it encounters the daily cronjob it simply checks if it is midnight. If it is midnight it runs the job.
Also, take "every thirty minute" cronjob. Maybe you registered the cronjob at 10:25. But still the first time it will run on 10:30, not on 10:55. It doesn't care what time you registered or when was the last time it ran. It only checks if the current minute is "00" or divisible by thirty. So at 10:30 it will run. Again, it will run on 11:00. and so on.
Similarly a ten minute cronjob by default will only check if the current minute is divisible by ten or not. So, regardless of the time you registered the command it will run only on XX:00, XX:10, XX:20 and so on.
That is why by default it doesn't need to store previously ran scheduled task. However, you can store it into a file if you want for monitoring purpose.

How quartz detect nodes fails

My production environment running a java scheduler job using quartz 2.1.4. on weblogic cluster server with 4 machine and only one schedule job execute at one cluster node (node 1) normally for few months, but node 2 sudden find the node 1 fail at take over the executing job last night. In fact, the node 1 without error (according to the server, network, database, application log), this event caused duplicate message created due to 2 process concurrent execute.
What is the mechanism of quartz to detect node fails? By ping scan, or heart beat ping via UCP broadcast, or database respond time other? Any configuration on it?
I have read the quartz configuration guide
http://quartz-scheduler.org/documentation/quartz-2.1.x/configuration/ConfigJDBCJobStoreClustering
, but there is no answer.
I am using JDBCJobstore. After details checking, we found that there is a database (Oracle) statement executing abnormal long (from 5 sec to 30 sec). The incident happened on this period of time. Do you think it related?
my configuration is
`
org.quartz.threadPool.threadCount=10
org.quartz.threadPool.threadPriority=5
org.quartz.jobStore.misfireThreshold = 10000
org.quartz.jobStore.class=org.quartz.impl.jdbcjobstore.JobStoreTX
`
Anyone have this information? Thanks.
I know the answer is very late, but maybe somebody like both of us will still need it.
Short version: it is all handled by DB. Important property would be org.quartz.jobStore.clusterCheckinInterval.
Long version (all credits go to http://flylib.com/books/en/2.65.1.91/1/ ) :
Detecting Failed Scheduler Nodes
When a Scheduler instance performs the check-in routine, it looks to
see if there are other Scheduler instances that didn't check in when
they were supposed to. It does this by inspecting the SCHEDULER_STATE
table and looking for schedulers that have a value in the
LAST_CHECK_TIME column that is older than the property
org.quartz.jobStore.clusterCheckinInterval (discussed in the next
section). If one or more nodes haven't checked in, the running
Scheduler assumes that the other instance(s) have failed.
Additionally the next paragraph might also be important:
Running Nodes on Separate Machines with Unsynchronized Clocks
As you can ascertain by now, if you run nodes on different machines and the
clocks are not synchronized, you can get unexpected results. This is
because a timestamp is being used to inform other instances of the
last time one node checked in. If that node's clock was set for the
future, a running Scheduler might never realize that a node has gone
down. On the other hand, if a clock on one node is set in the past, a
node might assume that the node has gone down and attempt to take over
and rerun its jobs. In either case, it's not the behavior that you
want. When you're using different machines in a cluster (which is the
normal case), be sure to synchronize the clocks. See the section
"Quartz Clustering Cookbook," later in this chapter for details on how
to do this.

how to know on which node job will executes in Quartz-Scheduler with TerracottaJobStore?

I have bind terracotteJobStore with Quartz-Scheduler
how can terracotteJobStore determine which job should next for which node for execution?
which algorithm uses for node selection in terracotteJobStore any idea ??
If 'Quartz Scheduler' is used with 'TerracotteJobStore' ,and there is any Job next to execute then selection of Node for that Job will be Random.
Using 'Qurtz Where' it is possible to make Job on criteria base.
Means if u want to make a Job that must run on a Node which have core at least 2 or
to make a Job which run on a Node which have 70% CPU load average or
to make a Job which run on a Node which have at least Java Heap Free memory 330 MB
in such case 'Quartz Where' is useful.
It is predictable on which Node , Job will execute only in the case of "Quartz Where'.
With OS Terracotta's JobStore you don't get to decide which node the job will be executed on. Not that it really happens randomly, but the scheduler behaves as in non-clustered mode. So basically, every node will, at a regular interval and, based on the next trigger to fire when to acquire the next trigger(s). Since all the nodes in cluster behave the same way, the first to acquire the lock, will also be able to acquire triggers first.
Terracotta EE comes with the Quartz Where feature that lets you describe where jobs should be fired. You learn more on Quartz Where by watching this short screencast I did: http://www.codespot.net/blog/2011/03/quartz-where-screencast/
Hope that'll help.

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.

How to run a per second cron job every two minutes

I have to set up a cron job on my hosting provider.
This cron job needs to run every second. It's not intensive, just doing a check.
The hosting provider however only allows cron jobs to be run every two minutes. (can't change hosting btw)
So, I'm clueless on how to go about this?
My thoughts so far:
If it can only run every two minutes, I need to make it run every second for two minutes. 1) How do I make my script run for two minutes executing a function every second?
But it's important that there are no interruptions. 2) I have to ensure that it runs smoothly and that it remains constantly active.
Maybe I can also try making it run forever, and run the cron job every two minutes checking whether it is running? 3) Is this possible?
My friend mentioned using multithreading to ensure it's running every second. 4) any comments on this?
Thanks for any advice. I'm using ZF.
Approach #3 is the standard solution. For instance you can have the cron job touch a file every time it runs. Then on startup you can check whether that file has been touched recently, and if it has then exit immediately. Else start running. (Other approaches include using file locking, or else writing the pid to a file and on startup check whether that pid exists and is the expected program.)
As for the one second timeout, I would suggest calling usleep at the end of your query, supplying the number of milliseconds from now to when you next want to run. If you do a regular sleep then you'll actually run less than once a second because sleeps sometimes last longer than expected, and your check takes time. As long as your check takes under a second to run, this should work fine.
I don't think cron allows second level resolution. http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?crontab+5
field allowed values
----- --------------
minute 0-59
hour 0-23
day of month 1-31
month 1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
So, even if your hosting provider allows you can't run a process that repeats every second. However, you can user command something like watch for repeated execution of your script. see here

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