Public bug reported:
Hello,
Currently the meta data stored for cron jobs is fairly limited having only the
following fields:
<TABLE NAME="cron">
<FIELDS>
<FIELD NAME="id" TYPE="int" LENGTH="10" NOTNULL="true" SEQUENCE="true"
/>
<FIELD NAME="callfunction" TYPE="char" LENGTH="255" NOTNULL="true" />
<FIELD NAME="nextrun" TYPE="datetime" NOTNULL="false" />
<FIELD NAME="minute" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*"
/>
<FIELD NAME="hour" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*"
/>
<FIELD NAME="day" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*" />
<FIELD NAME="month" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*"
/>
<FIELD NAME="dayofweek" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true"
DEFAULT="*" />
</FIELDS>
We are implementing a plugin for Mahara that will mirror the cron check
functionality present in this Moodle plugin:
https://github.com/brendanheywood/moodle-tool_heartbeat.
It would be beneficial if Mahara included two new fields in the cron and
the plugintype_cron tables:
1. lastruntime - the last runtime of the cron job.
Currently on /admin/statistics.php the following sql is used to determine if
cron has run.
record_exists_select('cron', 'nextrun IS NULL OR nextrun < CURRENT_DATE') -
from a monitoring standpoint this is not acceptable as it will give false
positives/negatives depending on the situation. With this change, the max
lastruntime could be used to determine if cron had run recently.
2. faildelay - An Exponentially increasing fail delay that is updated
when the cron job fails (if it throws an exception). This way if there
is a consistently failing cron job its execution is throttled and its
failure is being tracked in some way aside from just logging an error.
The heartbeat plugin above uses this to help us to identify and fix
issues that would otherwise go undetected.
Aside from the benefits from a monitoring perspective, these fields
provide useful information when it comes to debugging anything cron
related.
I'm happy to discuss at any time and more than happy to do the dev on
this. Ill be floating around the Mahara IRC under the kenH handle if you
would like to talk at any time.
Thanks,
Kenneth
** Affects: mahara
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1680633
Title:
Cron job metadata
Status in Mahara:
New
Bug description:
Hello,
Currently the meta data stored for cron jobs is fairly limited having only
the following fields:
<TABLE NAME="cron">
<FIELDS>
<FIELD NAME="id" TYPE="int" LENGTH="10" NOTNULL="true"
SEQUENCE="true" />
<FIELD NAME="callfunction" TYPE="char" LENGTH="255" NOTNULL="true" />
<FIELD NAME="nextrun" TYPE="datetime" NOTNULL="false" />
<FIELD NAME="minute" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true"
DEFAULT="*" />
<FIELD NAME="hour" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*"
/>
<FIELD NAME="day" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true" DEFAULT="*"
/>
<FIELD NAME="month" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true"
DEFAULT="*" />
<FIELD NAME="dayofweek" TYPE="char" LENGTH="25" NOTNULL="true"
DEFAULT="*" />
</FIELDS>
We are implementing a plugin for Mahara that will mirror the cron
check functionality present in this Moodle plugin:
https://github.com/brendanheywood/moodle-tool_heartbeat.
It would be beneficial if Mahara included two new fields in the cron
and the plugintype_cron tables:
1. lastruntime - the last runtime of the cron job.
Currently on /admin/statistics.php the following sql is used to determine if
cron has run.
record_exists_select('cron', 'nextrun IS NULL OR nextrun < CURRENT_DATE') -
from a monitoring standpoint this is not acceptable as it will give false
positives/negatives depending on the situation. With this change, the max
lastruntime could be used to determine if cron had run recently.
2. faildelay - An Exponentially increasing fail delay that is updated
when the cron job fails (if it throws an exception). This way if there
is a consistently failing cron job its execution is throttled and its
failure is being tracked in some way aside from just logging an error.
The heartbeat plugin above uses this to help us to identify and fix
issues that would otherwise go undetected.
Aside from the benefits from a monitoring perspective, these fields
provide useful information when it comes to debugging anything cron
related.
I'm happy to discuss at any time and more than happy to do the dev on
this. Ill be floating around the Mahara IRC under the kenH handle if
you would like to talk at any time.
Thanks,
Kenneth
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