I m able to build a windows service and install it.
I m curious how can i run this service every hour ? I want it to run every hour periodically.
I also need to know the hour range that it s running so that I can store it somewhere.
How can i do that?
Edit : This service will be installed on many machines, therefore, I dont want to create a scheduled task say on 100 servers.
If you want a task to run on a regular interval as opposed to constantly, you should look into using the Task Scheduler.
If you need your code to be a service, but to be "activated" every hour, the easiest approach would be to make your service a COM object and have a simple task scheduled every hour that invokes a jscript/vbscript that creates your COM object and calls simple method on it.
The alternative is to use any of the wait APIs to "waste" an hour without consuming cycles.
Note that you also have to consider some interesting design decisions that depend on what your scenario is:
how is your service going to be started if it crashes or is stopped by the user?
if you are started after more than an hour, should you run again or do you need to wait to get on the exact hourly schedule?
how do you keep track of the last "activation" time if the timezone or the day-light saving time has changed while you were not active?
does your service prevent the computer from going to sleep/hibernate on idling or when the laptop cover is closed? if not, do you need to awake the computer on the hour to get your service working on your schedule?
Some of those are taken care of by the task scheduler, so I would strongly recommend going that route vs. waiting for an hour in your code.
You could create a scheduled task that runs every hour, to either run the service or send a message to "wake it up". Then, either pass in the current time in the scheduled task request, or just have your program pick up the current time when it wakes up.
Task Scheduler Managed Wrapper can help you set this up programmatically; you can google for other resources as well.
There are a couple options.
You could sleep for an hour.
You might be better suited for a Scheduled Task, not a service.
Thread.Sleep(1000*60*60);
Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromHours(1));
code more readable this way
Thread.Sleep() solution will make sure that your service will run in one hour intervals, not every hour i.e. each task will be started at 1 hour + time to run the task. Consider using a Timer within your service. This will be a more robust solution since you have a control when to run a task, monitor its progress etc. Just remember that each Timer event will be fired in a different thread and if the task takes longer than one hour to run you might have to wait for the first task to finish to avoid concurrent tasks.
Task schedulers may be a good idea but services are designed to do this. Services gets installed easily and logs things properly. All you need to do is, at start of service, you can install a system timer (System.Threading.Timer) or there is also one more timer.
Related
I am working on .net windows application.
I am using System.Threading.Thread.
In a single form using five(5) threads. I have a code which when run, it executes series of lines in sequence. I would like to add a pause in between.
For that i am using
Thread.Sleep(10800000)
of 3 hours
But I checked in debug mode, after executing line of
Thread.Sleep(10800000)
My debug not goes to next line or next line never executes even after waiting for 4 hours.
I am using this Thread.Delay in other thread not in main thread.
This delay requires because, i send a command to configure setting to a hardware, that setting requires minimum 3 hours to complete.
That's why i am using this
Thread.Delay(10800000)
Means my onward code is proceed only after waiting for 3 hours.
Can any one help me?
Thread.Sleep is not designed for long sleeps. You should consider using somthing like System.Threading.Timer.
Provides a mechanism for executing a method on a thread pool thread at specified intervals.
You can give it a first run time of midnight, and have it go off every 24 hours. the Timer(TimerCallback, Object, TimeSpan, TimeSpan) constructor is exactly what you are looking for.
One would argue that even using a timer is not the best tool for the job. You may want to consider using Windows Task Scheduler (TS) instead. With TS, you can setup a schedule to say run your app and carry out the workflow, or if your program must run all the time, trigger another process that communicates with your app somehow.
If the process is not doing anything until the next interval then it's best to just simply kill the app. That way you won't be wasting threads or processes twiddling their thumbs over exorbitant delays waiting for the next interval to do something.
You can use the Microsoft Task Scheduler v2 COM Library from c# to setup your schedules or do so manually from the TS UI itself.
I have a fairly long-running process (several minutes) that I need to run roughly once a month - but not on a fixed schedule, but after a user clicks Go in a ASP.NET Webforms GUI page.
Since ASP.NET really isn't designed to handle long-running background tasks, my idea was to put this into a separate console app. But how to launch that as needed?
What happens if I use Process.Start(....) from my ASP.NET page's code-behind? I would like to avoid blocking the whole Web UI for 20 minutes or so... and also: even if it doesn't block my UI, what happens to my long-running task if the ASP.NET app pool recycles while it's still running?
Another idea was to have a frequently running job (runs every 2 minutes) check for some kind of a flag (e.g. existence of some database entries), and if needed, that job would then launch the long-running task.
But the same question: if I launch my 20-minute task from a job using Process.Start() - does that block the caller?
It seems like a bit of overkill to schedule that long running tasks five times a day since it typically is run only once a month - but at the same time, the user expects to have his results within a reasonable amount of time (less than 1 hour, if ever possible) after scheduling the process - so I cannot really just schedule it to run once at night either ...
Hangfire is what you are looking for. Best part is it comes with a built in dashboard.
You might have to write some logic on the top of it.
You can find it here.
http://hangfire.io/
First off - for several reasons - ASP.NET is imho not the solution for long-running tasks/jobs/... whatsoever.
I have had this requirement a lot of times, and always solved/separated it like:
Worker
A service with
Quartz.net (for scheduling and processing, even if you don't have a specific timestamp for execution - but the overall handling in this framework is simply superb)
a persistent job-store (to handle start/stop and completed/aborted/paused jobs)
eg ServiceStack as the interop between the two processes
Website
Simply calls some webservice-methods of the worker to enqueue/query/pause/stop/... a job. For querying jobs a call to a unified job-store might be an option (eg. db)
It might be a bit of an overkill for you though ... but this is my Swiss army knife for such scenarios.
Use the standard built-in Windows Task Scheduler like you have done, but invoke it from your web application.
Configure your task in Task Scheduler. It does not need to have a scheduled trigger. From your web application, just use Process.Start to kick it off:
SchTasks.exe /Run /TN Folder\Taskname
I have not used SchTasks.exe directly, but have used the Microsoft.Win32.TaskScheduler wrapper classes.
I'd like to implement a recurring functionality to do something that activates, say, every Monday.
What are the ways of doing this programmatically in a Window Forms application that runs continuously in a server?
I'm familiar with delays but I haven't implemented delays that span for a week or month.
In my opinion your best bet is to write this functionality in a Console app and create a task on the server using Scheduled Tasks (or SQL Scheduler, or your favorite Scheduling tool) to execute it at whatever interval you need.
I don't like to see apps have "hidden" tasks in the code that execute at a specific time. Too many opportunities to fail without notification.
With a scheduling tool you can view/change the schedule without having to touch source code.
As side notes, Windows Forms apps should run on the client, not on the server.
If you're app is already running anyways, what I would do is have a periodic task that checks whether you want to do your weekly task
here's psudocode to demonstrate the logic.
if(today is Monday && i didn't do this task yet today)
{
//do monday stuff
}
Ideally you should perform this operation under windows scheduled task. It will then take care of the recoccurrance as well as timing.
If you need to do this via a winforms application, then there are two options - periodic time polling or blocking wait/sleep.
With periodic time polling, you set a time interval in which the application must run. Then in a loop check if this period has elapsed, and take action. You can set the required level of accuracy in side the loop.
With blocking wait, you sleep the running thread until it is time to execute. The only issue with this approach is if the server restarts, the application should regain it's state and resume any sleep operations. The accuracy of this approach should be within a few seconds (depending on the time drift of your server).
I've got a windows service with only two methods - one private method DoWork(), and an exposed method which calls DoWork method. I want to achieve the following:
Windows service runs DoWork() method every 6 hours
An external program can also invoke the exposed method which calls DoWork() method. If the service is already running that method called from the service, DoWork() will again be invoked after the current method ends.
What's the best approach to this problem? Thanks!
An alternative approach would be to make use of a console application which can be scheduled by Windows task scheduler to run every 6 hours. In that case you don't waste resources to keep the Windows service running the entire time but only consume resources when needed.
For your second question: when you take the console app approach you can have it called by making use of Process.Start for example.
If the purpose of your application is only to run a specific task every six hours, you might be better off creating a command line application and creating a scheduled task that Windows runs automatically. Obviously, you could then manually start this application.
If you're still convinced you need a service (and honestly, from what I've seen so far, it sounds like you don't), you should look into using a Timer, but choose your timer carefully and read this article to get a better understanding of the timers built into .NET (Hint: Pay close attention to System.Timers.Timer).
To prevent reentry if another method tries to call DoWork() while the process is in the middle of performing its operation, look into using either a Mutex or a Semaphore.
there are benefits and drawbacks either way. my inclination with those options is to choose the windows service because it makes your deployment easier. scheduling things with the windows task scheduler is scriptable and can be automated for deployment to a new machine/environment, but it's still a little more nonstandard than just deploying and installing a windows service. you also need to make sure with task scheduler it is running under an account that can make the webservice call and that you aren't going to have problems with passwords expiring and your scheduled tasks suddenly not running. with a windows service, though, you need to have some sort of checking in place to make sure it is always running and that if it restarts that you don't lose hte state that lets it know when it should run next.
another option you could consider is using nservicebus sagas. sagas are really intended for more than just scheduling tasks (they persist state for workflow type processes that last for more than the duration of a single request/message), but they have a nice way of handling periodic or time-based processes (which is a big part of long running workflows). in that a saga can request that it get back a message from a timeout manager at a time it requests. using nservicebus is a bigger architectural question and probably well beyond the scope of what you are asking here, but sagas have become how i think about periodic processes and it comes with the added benefit of being able to manage some persistent state for your process (which may or may not be a concern) and gives you a reason to think about some architectural questions that perhaps you haven't considered before.
you can create a console application for your purpose. You can schedule the application to run every 6 hours. The console will have a default method called on application start. you can call your routine from this method. Hope this helps!!
How is this done best? I want an app that's running on a server to trigger an event every night at 03:00.
Use windows task scheduler
If you want to do this in running app code (instead of using a task scheduler), you should choose a duration to let your app sleep that's fairly long (e.g., 1 hour, or 3,600 sec). Your app loops, and as each sleep call expires, the app periodically checks how much time is left until the deadline time (03:00). Once the remaining sleep time gets below the coarse interval time, it should be reduced to a shorter interval (halved each time, or reduced to 10 sec). Continue the loop, sleeping and reducing the interval time, until the target deadline time is reached.
This prevents the loop from waking up too often (86,400 1-sec intervals is overkill), but it also prevents the app loop from overshooting the target deadline time by sleeping too long.
You could make a timer with an interval of 1 second and when the timer goes off, check if it's 3:00.
You'll need to build it in a service in order to ensure that it runs even if there's nobody logged into the machine, and then there are lots of different methods to ensure that the trigger occurs.
Consider making a System.Timers.Timer where the Interval is set to the difference between DateTime.Now and the next 3:00.
There are two basic options here.
If you're trying to do this within an existing service, you can use a Timer to trigger yourself at 3:00 each night, and run your "task".
That being said, this is typically better handled via Windows Task Scheduler. Instead of keeping the application alive 24/7, you just schedule it to run once every day at 3:00.
Edit:
If you need to work with the Task Scheduler from code (mentioned in another comment), that is also possible. The Task Scheduler provides an API for setting up individual Tasks (ITask) via the Task scheduler (ITaskScheduler).
However, given that you're working on XP Embedded, you're probably better off just using the normal system configuration capabilities, and setting up a task to run once each day. In an embedded system, you should have enough control during your deployment to do this.
Here is a simplified version of a service that we wrote that runs a timer every 60 seconds to watch a table... you could alter the timer elapse event to check the time and run it then:
Dim Timer As System.Timers.Timer
Protected Overrides Sub OnStart(ByVal args() As String)
Timer = New System.Timers.Timer(60000)
AddHandler Timer.Elapsed, AddressOf timer_Elapsed
Timer.Start()
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub OnStop()
Timer2.Stop()
End Sub
Private Sub timer_Elapsed(ByVal pSender As Object, ByVal pargs As System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs)
'Ensure the tick happens in the middle of the minute
If DateTime.Now.Second < 25 Then
Timer.Interval = 65000
ElseIf DateTime.Now.Second > 35 Then
Timer.Interval = 55000
ElseIf DateTime.Now.Second >= 25 And DateTime.Now.Second <= 35 Then
Timer.Interval = 60000
End If
'Logic goes here
End Sub
Obviously, if you can, use the task scheduler like everyone else here has mentioned. It is the preferred way of doing this. I just happened to have this code laying around so I thought I'd post it in case it could be helpful to you. Also, this code worked for us because we never knew when an external source was going to edit a table. Setting the interval to a correct number of milliseconds would be a much more efficient way of doing this, as pointed out by md5sum.
This answer might be a bit left field, but we often use CruiseControl.NET for some of our scheduled tasks. It's not perfect for them all, but if it's a big job that you want to run every night and other code/outcomes depend on it then it's a good choice. You can schedule it to run whenever, get emails if it worked/failed. Run other scripts/code if it did not work, clean up files you need before you start and after.
Not the perfect solution to all situation, but it is damn powerful for those that call for it. We use it for some of our big data processing jobs, and it sends us all an email if it worked/failed and will even try again 30 minutes later if it failed the first time. It gives you a nice fuzzy feeling :)
Windows task scheduler (as suggested by klausbyskov) or a SQL Server job.
EDIT:
Or if you want a dyanically assigned time, you could create a windows service that polls every 10 minutes and performs some action at the desired time(s).
Creating a windows server in C# is fairly trivial and could do this. Just make sure you've got the security and logging figured out because it can be pretty hard to tell what's going on while it is (or isn't) running.
Use System.Threading.Timer.
I'm spawning a thread in an ASP.NET application to do scheduled tasks.
It depends on what you have available to you.
Your best bet is to use a cron job, if you are on Linux/Unix/Mac OS X, a task scheduler on Windows, or launchd on newer versions of Mac OS X.
If you want to do this from within an application, you would need a loop that checks the time on a regular basis and fires off the event if it is 03:00, but this isn't ideal.
Is the program able to run via command line? If so, create a foo.bat file, and call your program command line (very simple).
Then use Task Scheduler to run the .bat file at 3 a.m. daily.