Quart.Net is Sometimes Running Overlapping Tasks - quartz.net

I am using Quartz.Net 3.0.7 to manage a scheduler. In my test environment I have two instances of the scheduler running. I have a test process that runs for exactly 2 hours before ending. Quartz is configured to start the process every 10 seconds and I am using the DisallowConcurrentExecution attribute to prevent multiple instances of the task from running at the same time. 80% of the time this is working as expected. Quartz will start up the process and prevent any other instances of the task from starting until after the initial one has completed. If I stop one of the two services hosting Quart, then the other instance picks up the task at the next 10-second mark.
However, after keeping these two Quartz services running for 48 uninterrupted hours, I have discovered a couple of times where things went horribly wrong. At times host B will start up the task, even though the task is still in the middle of its 2 hour execution on host A. At one point I even found the process had started up 3 times on host B, all within a 10 minute period. So, for a two hour period, the one task had three instances running simultaneously. After all three finished, Quartz went back to the expected schedule of only having one instance running at a time.
If these overlapping tasks were happening 100% of the time, I would think there is something wrong on my end, but since it seems to happen only about 20% of the time, I am thinking it must be something in the Quartz implementation. Is this by design or is it a bug? If there is an event I can capture from Quart.Net to tell me that another instance of a task has started up, I can listen for that and stop the existing task from running. I just need to make sure that DisallowConcurrentExecution is getting obeyed and prevent a task from running multiple instances concurrently. Thanks.
Edit:
I added logic that uses context.Scheduler.GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs to look for any jobs that have the same JobDetail.Key but a different FireInstanceId when my task starts up. If I find another currently executing job, I will prevent this instance from doing anything. I am finding that in the duplicate concurrent scenario, Quartz is reporting that there are no other jobs currently executing with the same JobDetail.Key. Should that be possible? Under what case would Quartz.Net start an IJob, lose track of it as an executing job after a few minutes, but allow it to continue executing without cancelling the CancellationToken?
Edit2:
I found an instance in my logs where Quartz started a task as expected. Then, one minute later, Quartz tried to start up 9 additional instances, each with a different FireInstanceId. My custom code blocked the 9 additional instances, because it can see that the original instance was still going, by calling GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs to get a list of running jobs. I double checked and the ConcurrentExecutionDisallowed flag is true on all of the tasks at runtime, so I would expect that Quartz would prevent the duplicate instances. This sounds like a bug. Am I expected to handle this manually or should I expect Quartz to get this right?
Edit3:
I am definitely looking at two different problems. In both cases Quartz.Net is launching my IJob instance with a new FireInstanceId while there is already another FireInstanceId running for the same JobKey. In one scenario I can see that both FireInstanceIds are active by calling GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs. In the second scenario calling GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs shows that the first FireInstanceId is no longer running, even though I can see from my logs that the original instance is still running. Both of these scenarios result in multiple instances of my IJob running at the same time, which is not acceptable. It is easy enough to tackle the first scenario by calling GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs when my IJob starts, but the second scenario is harder. I will have to ping GetCurrentlyExecutingJobs on an interval and stop the task if it’s FireInstanceId has disappeared from the active list. Has anyone else really not noticed this behavior?

I found that if I set this option, that I no longer have overlapping executing jobs. I still wish that Quartz would cancel the job’s cancellation token, though, if it lost track of the executing job.
QuartzProperties.Add("quartz.jobStore.clusterCheckinInterval", "60000");

Related

How can I schedule a Jenkins job to be started only when it is not already running?

The cron part is easy and covered elsewhere. What I have is a job that runs mostly for six hours but sometimes only two or three. If I schedule the job for every six hours and it only runs for two, I waste four hours waiting for the next one. If I schedule it every hour, then when it runs six hours, five jobs are going to stack up waiting their turn.
Rigging something in the job itself to figure out if it already running is sub optimal. There are four machines involved so I can't examine process tables. I would need a semaphore on disk or in some other shared resource, which involves making sure it is cleared not only when the job finishes, but when it dies.
I could also query Jenkins to see if a job is already running, but that's also more code I need to write and get right.
Is there a way to tell Jenkins directly: Schedule only if you are not already running?
Maybe disableConcurrentBuilds could help? https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/
And you can also clean the queue if needed

Sidekiq not adding jobs to queue

Sometime ago I wrote a small Ruby application which uses Sidekiq to convert video files and pushes them further to few online video hosting services. I use two Workers and Queues, one to actually convert file and second to publish converted files. Jobs are pushed to first Queue by Rails application for conversion, and after successful processing Conversion Worker pushes Upload job to second queue.
Rails -> Converter Queue -> Uploader Queue
Recently I discover a massive memory leak in converter library which appears after every few jobs and overloads whole server, so I did a little hack to avoid this by stopping whole Sidekiq Worker process using Interrupt exception and starting it again by Systemd.
It works perfectly until yesterday. I get notification from my client that files are not converted. I did some investigation to find out whats failing and found that jobs are not added to Converter queue. It starts failing without any changes in code or services. When Rails adds jobs to Sidekiq Queue it receives proper Job ID, no exception or warning at all, but the job simply not appears in any Queue. I checked Redis logs, Systemd logs, dmesg, every logs that i could check and did not find even the slightest warning - it seems that jobs get lost in vacuum :/ In fact, after more digging and debugging I discover that if one job is pushed rapidly ( 100 times in a loop ), then there is a chance that Sidekiq will add job to Queue. Of course, sometimes it will add all jobs, and sometimes not even single one.
The second Queue works perfectly - it picks every single job that I add to it. When I try to add 1000 new jobs, second Queue queues them all, when Converter queue gets at best 10 jobs. Things gets really weird when I try to use another Queue - I pushed 100 jobs to a new Queue, of course all of them are added properly and then I instruct Conversion worker to use that new Queue. And it works - I can add new Jobs to that Queue and it seems that all of them are pushed successfully - but when Worker finish processing all jobs that were pushed before that Worker was assigned to this Queue it starts to failing again. Disabling code that restarts Worker after every job didn't help at all.
Funny thing is that in fact jobs are pushed to Queue but only when I pushes them multiple times, and it seems totally random when Job is added properly. This bugs appears from nowhere, for few months things works perfectly and recently starts failing without any changes in code or server. Logs are perfectly clear, Sidekiq is used with the same Redis server without any problems by few other applications - it seems that only this particular Worker have this problem. I did not found any references to similar bug on the web and I spent two days trying to debug this and find source of this weird behavior, and I found nothing, everything seems to work perfectly and Jobs are simply disappearing somewhere between push and Redis database.

Service vs Scheduled Task intervals

If you have a recurring task that runs once per day, you use a Scheduled Task.
If you have a recurring task that runs every 10 seconds, you use a Service.
At what point do you switch between the two? Is there official guidance on this somewhere?
i`m not sure the interval is the main issue here.
here are a few thing to consider:
how much state this task needs in memory - do you load stuff from a file of DB ?
does the system that needs this task to run, have a need to communicate with the task
other that when its running ?
do you need more control over the process lifecycle when the task is up?
you can see where i`m going with this , that a service is a resident entity, and a sched task isn't.
i think it depends on the point if your programm is made for only one task or for more. if it's just doin' one "stupid" thing (like running a stored procedure in a database every 20 seconds) i would concidering a sheduled task, but if it does more than that and maybe got some dependencies (maybe what time it is running or some file-operations) I would concider a service.
I would also concider a service if the intervals when the operation is made are different. Let's say your programm runs a single stored procedure in a database and depending on the fact that it made "real" changes to the db. If it did something the next run is in 5 seconds and if not the next run is in 20 seconds. That's one of the perfect examples for a service.

Quartz.Net jobs not always running - can't find any reason why

We're using Quartz.Net to schedule about two hundred repeating jobs. Each job uses the same IJob implementing class, but they can have different schedules. In practice, they end up having the same schedule, so we have about two hundred job details, each with their own (identical) repeating/simple trigger, scheduled. The interval is one hour.
The task this job performs is to download an rss feed, and then download all of the media files linked to in the rss feed. Prior to downloading, it wipes the directory where it is going to place the files. A single run of a job takes anywhere from a couple seconds to a dozen seconds (occasionally more).
Our method of scheduling is to call GetScheduler() on a new StdSchedulerFactory (all jobs are scheduled at once into the same IScheduler instance). We follow the scheduling with an immediate Start().
The jobs appear to run fine, but upon closer inspection we are seeing that a minority of the jobs occasionally - or almost never - run.
So, for example, all two hundred jobs should have run at 6:40 pm this evening. Most of them did. But a handful did not. I determine this by looking at the file timestamps, which should certainly be updated if the job runs (because it deletes and redownloads the file).
I've enabled Quartz.Net logging, and added quite a few logging statements to our code as well.
I get log messages that indicate Quartz is creating and executing jobs for roughly one minute after the round of jobs starts.
After that, all activity stops. No jobs run, no log messages are created. Zero.
And then, at the next firing interval, Quartz starts up again and my log files update, and various files start downloading. But - it certainly appears like some JobDetail instances never make it to the head of the line (so to speak) or do so very infrequently. Over the entire weekend, some jobs appeared to update quite frequently, and recently, and others had not updated a single time since starting the process on Friday (it runs in a Windows Service shell, btw).
So ... I'm hoping someone can help me understand this behavior of Quartz.
I need to be certain that every job runs. If it's trigger is missed, I need Quartz to run it as soon as possible. From reading the documentation, I thought this would be the default behavior - for SimpleTrigger with an indefinite repeat count it would reschedule the job for immediate execution if the trigger window was missed. This doesn't seem to be the case. Is there any way I can determine why Quartz is not firing these jobs? I am logging at the trace level and they just simply aren't there. It creates and executes an awful lot of jobs, but if I notice one missing - all I can find is that it ran it the last time (for example, sometimes it hasn't run for hours or days). Nothing about why it was skipped (I expected Quartz to log something if it skips a job for any reason), etc.
Any help would really, really be appreciated - I've spent my entire day trying to figure this out.
After reading your post, it sounds a lot like the handful of jobs that are not executing are very likely misfiring. The reason that I believe this:
I get log messages that indicate Quartz is creating and executing jobs for roughly one minute after the round of jobs starts.
In Quartz.NET the default misfire threshold is 1 minute. Chances are, you need to examine your logging configuration to determine why those misfire events are not being logged. I bet if you throw open the the floodgates on your logging (ie. set everything to debug, and make sure that you definitely have a logging directive for the Quartz scheduler class), and then rerun your jobs. I'm almost positive that the problem is the misfire events are not showing up in your logs because the logging configuration is lacking something. This is understandable, because logging configuration can get very confusing, very quickly.
Also, in the future, you might want to consult the quartz.net forum on google, since that is where some of the more thorny issues are discussed.
http://groups.google.com/group/quartznet?pli=1
Now, your other question about setting the policy for what the scheduler should do, I can't specifically help you there, but if you read the API docs closely, and also consult the google discussion group, you should be able to easily set the misfire policy flag that suits your needs. I believe that Trigger's have a MisfireInstruction property which you can configure.
Also, I would argue that misfires introduce a lot of "noise" and should be avoided; perhaps bumping up the thread count on your scheduler would be a way to avoid misfires? The other option would be to stagger your job execution into separate/multiple batches.
Good luck!

rails backgroundjob running jobs in parallel?

I'm very happy with By so far, only I have this one issue:
When one process takes 1 or 2 hours to complete, all other jobs in the queue seem to wait for that one job to finish. Worse still is when uploading to a server which time's out regularly.
My question: is Bj running jobs in parallel or one after another?
Thank you,
Damir
BackgroundJob will only allow one worker to run per webserver instance. This is by design to keep things simple. Here is a quote from Bj's README:
If one ignores platform specific details the design of Bj is quite simple: the
main Rails application submits jobs to table, stored in the database. The act
of submitting triggers exactly one of two things to occur:
1) a new long running background runner to be started
2) an existing background runner to be signaled
The background runner refuses to run two copies of itself for a given
hostname/rails_env combination. For example you may only have one background
runner processing jobs on localhost in development mode.
The background runner, under normal circumstances, is managed by Bj itself -
you need do nothing to start, monitor, or stop it - it just works. However,
some people will prefer manage their own background process, see 'External
Runner' section below for more on this.
The runner simply processes each job in a highest priority oldest-in fashion,
capturing stdout, stderr, exit_status, etc. and storing the information back
into the database while logging it's actions. When there are no jobs to run
the runner goes to sleep for 42 seconds; however this sleep is interuptable,
such as when the runner is signaled that a new job has been submitted so,
under normal circumstances there will be zero lag between job submission and
job running for an empty queue.
You can learn more on the github page: Here

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