On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:20 AM, Jordan Brown <Jordan.Brown at sun.com> wrote: > > Hmm. I view cron jobs as services. They're just like those things that run > in the background; they just don't run all the time. I'd consider them to > be much like a service that executes in a loop with a "sleep".
Cron is the service. Crontabs are just data. (Waiting for the day someone suggests that smf becomes a mail spool. It provides service guarantees right, so each message is a service and smf is responsible for reliable delivery.) >>>> Would each cronjob get its own service name, or its own instance name? >>> >>> Yes. (Which, I'm not sure.) >> >> Oh great. svcs lists 10,000 entries... >> >> This idea clearly doesn't scale. > > 10K seems like a pretty large number; do you have any real systems with even > multiple hundred cron jobs? (Solaris ships with 6; RHEL looks like, > depending on definitions, it ships with about 16.) Not currently (fortunately!); but I've managed at least one system that was up well over a thousand (we had to significantly increase the queue limit). I wouldn't be surprised to come across systems that have many more cron jobs than traditional smf services. > But yes, perhaps svcs would need to have some kind of filtering. The first > would probably be that (by default) it'd show only *your* cron jobs. It would have to; you can't see another user's crontab at the moment. I just see smf as the wrong tool. >> Well, yes, that's one of the problems with the current scheme. I would >> love to 'crontab add' or 'crontab delete' a job without having to use or >> emulate an editor. Could easily be done by making each entry a separate >> file in a directory. Just deliver or remove the file > > That's a reasonable add/delete strategy, but doesn't give you > enable/disable. Also, if you (as I do) view them as equivalent to services, > it seems like they should be managed the same way that services are managed. > >> (on an inactive image, >> anyway - on a live image you need to ping cron). > > Cron could check the directory mod time every minute or two. Or hook into a proper event mechanism. (gamin?) You really don't want more applications randomly stat()ing all the time. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
