I have a windows shared hosting and i need to run some scheduled c# executable every day for create sitemap, send newsletter,etc...
The provider tell me that i can't run executable for security reason.
Whay can i do?
The provider suggest me to buy a VPS, but do not think it makes sense to spend more money just to run some scheduled task.
Does exists an alternative way?
Jeff Atwood has created blog entry on this.
In short:
Add an item to the cache
Make it expire on your wanted interval
Add a trigger to execute when the cache expires
Re-add your item in the trigger
I would first consider the solution from Andy, it looks easier to manage.
You can use ATrigger scheduling service on shared hosting simply. A .Net library is also available to create scheduled tasks without overhead. Also you have reporting panel to list tasks and log all possible errors.
Disclaimer: I was among the ATrigger team. It's a freeware and I have not any commercial purpose.
Implement your once-a-day task in an asp.net page on your shared server. Then set-up a process, on a machine that you do have full access to, to request that page once a day at a scheduled time.
If the once-a-day processing is time-consuming then you could do it in a thread created by the page. This would stop the request timing-out.
To prevent abuse you could give the page an obscure name, limit access via ip address (if the shared server's control panel allows that), and/or require authentication by the requesting process. The page could also store the last request time in cache and only do the required processing if sufficient time had elapsed since it was last requested.
It's not ideal, but you could inherit all your pages from a basepage (a page which inherits System.Web.UI.Page and subsequent pages inherit from that), and on each page load (in the basepage) you could check a database table of tasks which are to run on certain timeframes. If, on a given page load, the task which is to be run is selected at a given time, and that matches (or is past the time) the page was requested you could run it at that time.
This unfortunately depends on a website user visiting your site at or near the time you wish the job to run. Also, another drawback would be that if the user who requested the page may be waiting if your job is running synchronously to the execution of the remainder of the page.
Hope this helps.
There are schedule tasks in shared hosting panel.
http://pasteboard.co/2oBUrVeM.png
You may trigger the url of your action method that sends the emails.
Related
I need to run a long running task like report export, report import feature which will take few minutes to hour to complete the task. I want to start the task as soon as user gives command from the asp.net mvc view.
I found various web portals, but I couldn't find the exact solution I was looking for or might be I didn't got their idea (or, limited by my experience). I don't need something that runs at certain time interval or at certain time-stamp of the day/week. I only need the background job to be executed on user request and update the task as completed in DB after it's done. So, the background job need to be always triggered by user only.
I assume the ideal solution will be something like, Background service/job is always in ready state to accept trigger from my web application in some kind of port and as soon as it receives command from web application, it (a) either send everything to job when requested for action (b) or, just poke job to start its task (based on the updated db table entry made just before the call action) . So, the user can browse through other pages in the application and can view the progress of all such tasks in one of the view (where he can even cancel or see the completed task). Note, that there can be simultaneous request for the job from different web users which should be treated as separate job (As data export differs based on user access-rights).
I want to go with the simple method, with 100% assurance of task to be done/not done as recorded in db (no crashing of service). What are the best approaches (except azure jobs) as i want to implement the service within same server and I have access to the server/virtual machine to install windows services/packages if needed.
Take look at this great article that Hanselman wrote:
How to run Background Tasks in ASP.NET
Also Hangfire is a mature library that can make development of application long running process more easy.
Hangfire is an open-source framework that helps you to create, process and manage your background jobs, i.e. operations you don't want to put in your request processing pipeline
So I'm pretty new to using the Coldfusion solr search (just moved from a CF8 Mac OS X server to a Linux CF9 server), and I'm wondering what the best way to handle automatically updating the collections is. I know scheduled tasks are meant for this but I haven't been able to find any examples online.
I currently have a scheduled task set up to update all of the collections weekly by getting the list of collections and using the cfindex tag in a loop to run the refresh command. This is pretty processing intensive though and takes about ten minutes to update the four collections I have set up so far. This works when I run it in the browser, but I get this error "The request has exceeded the allowable time limit Tag: CFLOOP" when I run the task from scheduled task administration page.
Is there a better way to handle updating the collections? Would it be better if I made a task to update each collection individually?
Here's my update code.
<cfsetting requesttimeout="1800">
<cfcollection action="list" name="collections" engine="solr">
<cfloop query="collections">
<cfindex collection="#name#" action="refresh" extensions=".pdf, .html, .htm, .cfml, .cfm" type="path" key="/home/#name#/public_html/" recurse="yes">
</cfloop>
In earlier versions of ColdFusion there was a URL parameter that could be passed on any HTTP request to change the server's timeout for the requested page. You might have guessed from the scheduled task configuration that there's an HTTP request running your task, so it functions just like any other page. In those earlier versions you would have just added &requesttimeout=900 to the URL and that gave the server 15 minutes to process that task.
In later versions they realized that this URL parameter was a security risk but they needed a way to allow developers to declare that an individual HTTP request should still be allowed to take longer than the default page timeout set in the ColdFusion Administrator. So they moved it from the URL parameter to the <cfsetting> tag.
<cfsetting requesttimeout="900" />
You need to put the cfsetting tag at the top of the page, rather than putting it inside your loop, because it's resetting the total allowable time from the beginning of the request, not just since the last cfsetting tag. Ben Nadel wrote a blog article about that here: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/626-CFSetting-RequestTimeout-Updates-Timeouts-It-Does-Not-Set-Them.htm
I'm not sure if there's an upper limit to the request timeout. I do know that in the past when I've had a really long-running task like that, the server has gradually slowed down, in some cases until it crashed. I'm not sure if I would expect reindexing Solr collections to degrade performance so badly, I think my tasks were doing some other things that were probably hogging memory at the time. Anyway if you run into that issue, you may need to divide it up into separate tasks for each collection and just make sure there's enough time between the tasks to allow each one to complete before the next one starts.
EDIT: Oops! I don't know how I missed the cfsetting tag in the original question. D'oh! In any event, when you execute a scheduled task via the CF Administrator, it performs a cfhttp request to execute the task. This is the way scheduled tasks are normally executed, and I suspect it's so the task can execute inside your own application scope, but the effect is that there are two separate requests executing. I don't think there's a cfsetting tag in the CFIDE page, but I suspect a person could add one if they wanted to allow that page longer to wait for the task to complete.
EDIT: Okay, if you wanted to add the cfsetting in the CFIDE, you would first have to decrypt the template and then add your one line of code... which might void your warranty on the server, but is probably not dangerous. ;) For decrypting the template see: Can I get the source of a hacked Coldfusion template? - and the template to edit is /CFIDE/administrator/scheduler/scheduletasks.cfm.
I have some users in my web site that have a task with a deadline. I want to email them when their deadline is finish. but this action must be perform automatically. Is there any way to make something like that? should i use global in asp, or there is a better way?
You really should write either a scheduled task or a Windows service to perform that sort of action. An ASP.NET website will happily go to sleep if there are no requests, and you really don't want to have long running threads on a web server.
(There is a 'trick' using cache expiration to get scheduled callbacks to your code, try it if you can't use the options below.)
Write an endpoint (URL like /CheckTaskDeadline.ashx) that when called will check for task deadlines and trigger an action (send email). Add a scheduled task that makes a request for the endpoint every 5 minutes, or every hour (whatever granularity you need for reliably triggering close to the deadline). Use curl or wget to 'ping' the URL.
If you don't have access to the machine, sometimes you can create scheduled tasks using your webhost's configuration panel. If you don't, ask them nicely :-). A good hosting service provider should be able to help you. Otherwise, consider moving the application to another host, or get a separate 'ping' service, like Pingdom.
What are your most successful ways of running a long process, like 2 hours, in asp.net and return information to the client on the progress.
I've heard creating a windows service, httphandler and remoting can be successful.
Just a suggestion...
If you have logic that you are tyring to utilize already in asp.net... You could make an external app (windows service, console app, etc.) that calls a web service on your asp.net page.
For example, I had a similiar problem where the code I needed was asp.net and I needed to update about 3000 clients using this code. It started timing out, so I exposed the code through a web service. Then, instead of trying to run the whole 3000 clients at through asp.net all at once, I used a console app that is run by a nightly sql server job that ran the web service once for each client. This way all the time consuming processing was handled by the console app that doesn't have the time out issue, but the code we had already wrote in asp.net did not have to be recreated. In the end slighty modifying the design of my existing architecture allowed me easily get around this problem.
It really depends on the environment and constraints you have to deal with...Hope this helps.
There are two ways that I have handled this. First, you can simply run the process and let the client time out. This has two drawbacks: the UI isn't in synch and you are tying up an IIS thread for non-html purposes (I did this for a process that used to return quickly enough but that grew beyond time-out limits).
The better way to handle this is to write a "Service" application that handles the request as passed through a database table (put the details of the request there). Then you can create a window that gives the user a "window" into ongoing progress on the task (e.g. how many records have been processed or emails sent). This status window can either have a link to permit the user to refresh or you can automate the refresh using Ajax callbacks on a timer.
This isn't directly applicable but I wrote code that will let you run processes similar to "scheduled tasks" inside of ASP.NET without needing to use windows services or any type of cron jobs.
Scheduled Tasks in ASP.NET!
I very much prefer WCF service to scheduled tasks. You might (off the top of my head) pass an addr to the WCF service as a sort of 'callback' that the service can call with progress reports as it works.
I'd shy away from scheduled tasks... too course grained.
We require that in a ASP.Net application, a .Net process should be invoked every day at a specified time automatically. This process needs to interact with the database (SQL Server 2005) and generate billing on a daily basis. We are using a shared hosting hence we are not able to create a windows service or create SQL Server jobs. How can this be achieved without user intervention?
You could try the technique described here, used at StackOverflow itself (or at least it was used here at one point). In a nutshell:
At startup, add an item to the HttpRuntime.Cache with a fixed
expiration.
When cache item expires, do your work, such as WebRequest or what have
you.
Re-add the item to the cache with a fixed expiration.
To get it to run at a specific time instead of an interval, you could lower the interval and simply modify your working method to check the time itself.
As the comments in the original article linked above note, this isn't a perfect solution, and no one should prefer it over a proper scheduling technique if one is available. See When Does Asp.Net Remove Expired Cache Items? for some additional qualifications.
Yes, use Windows Scheduler. Depending on how it's configured you might need to be logged in for the scheduler to run.
You could always schedule a task to run a webservice..
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/10/24/428303.aspx
The scheduler would run a VBS file with the following..
Set oServerXML = CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")
oServerXML.Open "GET","http://my.hostedservice.com/myService.asmx/myService?aParam=Value
oServerXML.setRequestHeader "Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oServerXML.Send
Set oServerXML = nothing
Can't be done, unfortunately.
IIS only responds to requests, and SQL Server only wakes up for jobs.
The closest you'll be able to do is to put your routine in an ASPX page, not linked from the site and not with an obvious name, and trigger it by a request from some other machine out on the Internet.
The other machine could be a Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever you have available, and all of those platforms have ways of scheduling events (service, cron, etc.) that can make the request to trigger the update on the server.
There are ways to run "services" in .Net by using cache expiration to trigger the task.
More at CodeProject
You can use a Scheduled Task, but this might not work in a shared hosting environment either.
You could setup a webservice or page on your website to kickoff the process, then have a scheduled task on a desktop machine hit that page/service once daily to start the process. Hacky, but it might work.
Being .NET ignorant, I would imagine there's some kind of .NET based scheduler framework available for this (much like Quartz for Java).
Or you could simply fire off a long running thread that spends the bulk of its time sleeping, wake up every minute, check the time, check it's list of "things to do", fire off the ones that need to be done. Level of sophistication being as far as you want to take it, but the primary goal of keeping the primary scheduling thread "alive", "at all costs".
What i can think about now are:
Create a dll which contain the
schedule logic you want, and make
sure that this dll schedule function
will not stop and will loop for ever,
then you will need a page on that
server this page will fire this dll
functions. "you will need to call
this page at least once to start the
scheduler".
Create an application "holds schedule logic" on another machine, may be your Home PC, and make your pc application call the functions on the server through webservices or pages