I am developing the online bidding system using SP.NET where I need to close the auction if the auction time is get closed without any bid.
As on this website (archived link)
Any ideas on how to implement that?
I can think of 4 ways to do this:
1: A bit hackish, but you can try to use the "cache expiration technique" described here
In short, you rely on the ASP.NET cache expiration mechanism to run some code at a set time. In your case you could set this time to the expiration time of the auction the moment the auction gets created. However, this is unreliable, what if you get a server restart? You can say bye to your cache. But if you use a shared service where you don't have access to the server, this could be your solution.
2: A little better, you can write an .aspx page and call it from the Windows task scheduler every X minutes to run your code. The issue here is that you would have to execute a public page. Could be a security concern.
3: Much better, you can write a Windows Service. But this may be too much work if you lack the time.
4: Have a look at Quartz.NET, this is a .NET port of the industry-standard Java project of the same name. I haven't tried it but it looks promising.
Related
I need some information from you.I have used session.TimeOut=540 in application.Is that effects on my Application performance after some time.When number of users increases its getting very slow. response time nearly more that 2 minutes for a button click also.This is hosted in server in Application pool .I don't know about Application pool much.If Session Timeout is the problem i will remove it.Please suggest me the way to for more users.
Job Numbers,CustomerID,Tasks will come from one database.when the user click start Button then the data saved in another Database.I need this need to be faster for more Users
I think that you have some page(s) that make some work that takes time, or for some reason or a bug is keep open for more time than the usual.
This page is keep lock the session and hold the rest page from response because the session holds all the pages.
Now, together with the increase of the timeout this page is lock everything and here is you response time near to 2 minutes.
The solution is to locate the page that have the long running problem and fix it or make it faster by optimize the process, or if this page must keep the long time running, then disable the session for that one.
relative:
Web app blocked while processing another web app on sharing same session
What perfmon counters are useful for identifying ASP.NET bottlenecks?
Replacing ASP.Net's session entirely
Trying to make Web Method Asynchronous
Does ASP.NET Web Forms prevent a double click submission?
About server
Now from the other hand, if your server suffer from hardware, or bad setup then here is one other answer with points that you need to check to make it faster.
Find out where the time is spent
add the StopWatch in the method which you said "more that 2 minutes for a button click". you can find which statment spent the most time.
If it is a query on DB that cost time. Check your sql statement.
are you using "SELECT Count(*)" instead of "SELECT Count(Id)"? the * is always slower. also, don't try "SELECT * FROM...."
Use cache.
there are many ways to do cache. both in ASPX pages and your biz layer.
the OutputCache is the most easy way.
and also, cache the page (for example a blog post) on the first time when a user visit it.
Did you use memory paging?
be careful when doing paging on gridview or other list. If you just call DataSource=xxx and DataBind(), even with PagedDataSource, this is likely a memory paging. It cost a lot of performance. Please use stored procedures to do paging.
Check your server environment
where did you deploy the website? many ISP will limit brandwide and IIS connection count and also CPU time to your account.
if you have RD access to your server. you can watch CPU and memory usage to see if they are high when many user comes to your site. If the site is slow and neither CPU nor memory useage is high, it may be a network brandwide problem.
Here are some simple steps to narrow down the issue -
1) Get HTTPWatch (theres a free Basic version) available and check whats really taking time from an end user perspective. Look at number of requests, number of resources downloaded, and the payload. If there is nothing to worry move on to next
2) If its not client, then its usually the processing time on the server. Jump on to DB first - since this is quite easier to eliminate quickly. Look at how many DB calls are made (run profiler in staging or dev) and see if there are any long running queries, missing indexes or statistics, and note the IO. If all is well, move on
3) Check your app code. You could get on with VS.NET in build profiler or professional tools such as Ants. If code is fine then its your network or external calls that you make, check your network bandwidth. If you still cannot narrow down, check your environment/hardware
The best way to get to it is to apply load - You could use simple tools such as ab.exe (that comes as part of Apache Web server) to have concurrent hits on your server and run the App, DB profilers in the background to get to the issue.
Hope this helps!
I know that similar questions have been asked all over the place, but I'm having trouble finding one that relates directly to what I'm after.
I have a website where a user uploads a data file, then that file is transformed and imported into SQL. The file could be up to 50mb in size, and some times this process can take 30 minutes or sometimes even longer.
I realise I need to palm off the actual work to another process, and poll that process on the web page. I'm wondering what the best approach would be though? Being a web developer by trade, I'm finding all this new Windows Service stuff a bit confusing, and I just wanted somewhere to start.
So:
Can I do / should I being doing this with a windows service? if so, how?
Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
clarifications
The data is imported into sql, there's no file distribution taking place.
If there is a failure, it absolutely MUST be reported to the user. The web page will poll every, lets say, 5 seconds, from the time the async task begins, to get the 'status' of the import. Once it's finished another response will tell the page to stop polling for status updates.
queries on final decision
ok, so as I thought, it seems that a windows service is the best idea. So as to HOW to get it to work, it seems the 'put the file there and wait for the service to pick it up' idea is the generally accepted way, is there a way I can start a process run by the service, without it having to constantly be checking a database table / folder? As I said earlier, I don't have any experience with Windows Services - I wondered if I put a public method in the service, can I call it somehow?
well ...
var thread = new Thread(() => {
// your action
});
thread.Start();
but you will have problems with that:
what if the import to sql fails? should there be any response to the client
if it fails, how do you ensure the file on a later request
what if the applications shuts down ... this newly created and started thread will be killed either
...
it's not always a good idea to store everything in sql (especially files...). if you want to make the file available to several servers why not distribute them via ftp ...?
i believe that your whole concept is a bit messed up (sry assuming this), and it might be helpful if you elaborate and give us more information about your intentions!
edit:
Can I do / should I being doing this
with a windows service? if so, how?
you can :) i advise you to create a simple console-program and convert this with srvany and sc. you can get a rough overview howto here (note: insert blanks after =... that's a silly pitfall)
the term should is relative, because you did not answer the most important question
what if a record is persisted to the database, telling a consumer that file test.img should be persisted, but your service hasn't captured it or did not transform it yet?
so ... next on
Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
you probably could create a WCF-service which recieves some binary-data and then stores this to a database. this request could be async. yes. but what for?
once again:
please give us more insight to your workflow: what are you exactly trying to achieve? which "environmental-conditions" to you have (eg. app A polls db and expects file-records which are referenced in table x to be persisted) ...
edit:
so you want to import a .csv-file. well that changes everything :)
but i won't advise you to use a wcf-service (there could be a usage: eg. a wcf-service which has a method to insert a single row, then your iteration through the file would be implemented in another app... not that good, though).
i would suggest following:
at first do everything in your webapp (as you've already done), but rather use some sort of bulk-insert and do your transformation/logic on the database.
if you have some sort of bottle-neck then, i would suggest you something like a minor job-service, eg:
webapp will upload the file and insert a row to a job-table. the job-service is continiously polling the table/or gets informed via wcf by the webapp (hey, hey, finally some sort of usage for WCF in your scenario... :) ) and then does the import-job, writing a finish-note to a table/or set the state of the job to finished ...
but this is a bit overkill :)
Please see if my below comments helps you to resolve your issue:
•Can I do / should I being doing this with a windows service? if so, how?
Yes you can do this with a windows service. And I think that is the way you should be doing it. You can implement your own service to process your request or you can use the open source code Job Proccessor
Basically the idea is..
You submit a request for processing
the csv file in database table with
some status as not started.
Then your windows service picks up
the request from database table which
are not started and update them as in
progress status.
Once the processing is complete
succesfully /unsuccesfuly your
service updated the database table
with status as Completed / Failed.
And your asp.net page can poll to
database table for the current status
every 5 sec or so.
•Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
you should not be using WCF for this purpose.
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
We have an ASP.Net 2.0 web application running in a web farm which is using the ASP.Net State service to store sessions.
We have been having problmes with the service intermittently and have changed a few things such as the machineKey in the machine.config.
My actual question is around the monitoring of the state service service. We have all 4 available performance counters running on the server that hosts the service and as yet we have not seen a single session time out. We have also seen the number of active sessions slowly rise over a period of time, but never become less.
Does the state service recognise when sessions time out? Is there something we should be doing manually?
Edit: We have given up on the state service and gone with SQL server sessions.
To answer the questions below, it seems that sessions go up forever until the service falls over and it is very doubtful that any oen threads are linked to the state server. This is a fairly basic web app at the end of the day.
It seems from the reading I am doing that anumber of other people have experienced similar things, but there seems to be a general lack of common sense and knowledge in any responses flying about.
MS seem to have almost no documentation on this topic.
In ASP.Net session time outs can be configured in web.config and machine.config. The default time out assuming nothing has changed will be 20 mins. The machine.config file can be set to not allow overriding, which means that any changes specified in web.config files will not override these settings.
Have you ensured that the appropriate settings are in place in both machine and web config files?
The state service should drop each session after 20 mins of inactivity assuming the default settings.
At what point are your inactive sessions dropped? I assume they are not exponentially increasing, unless your are restarting the service in order to clear them they must be being dropped at some point.
Do you have something that might be hitting the session and keeping it alive without you knowing? Is there are thread being spawned somehwere that is doing work inteh background and holding on to your session? As far as my expeireince goes the timeout is set int he web config file and it just doesn't it's magic from there.
In my experience we've found out that native state server or even using SQL Server for sessions is a very scary scenario as both have issues.
I think you can explore other products for this to achive the absolute best.
A free option would be Velocity but it is still not released.
And another comprehensive but proven product will be (Very expensive actually) NCache
Take a look and see which looks best for you.
About SQL Server, you server will die very soon if you have enough number of hits coming in (I belive you have some hits already which yielded you to do Web Farm or you do it just for the sake of redundancy)
I am sure this will get modded down, but I have to say it.
If you are having issues with the state server, then there is likely an error somewhere in your web application. Charles' comment above seems like good places to start checking, but somewhere there is a life cycle issue.
Go back over the code and check your assumptions. Take a new computer, visit your website (create a session) and let it sit for an hour. If your session is still alive, then something is wrong. Create a new web application that just has a single page reporting the the age of the current session and try the same thing. You should find that after an hour (default is 20 minutes) the session is no longer valid. Now you have a system that is working as expect and one that is not, both using the same session server, so you can rule that out as the problem, now start going through code/configuration and see where you could be keeping it alive (or preventing the time-out).
Here, by the way, is a 'valid' session config. If you don't have your looking something like this, you have likely found your issue:
<sessionState
mode="StateServer"
stateConnectionString="tcpip=10.1.1.1:55455"
cookieless="false"
timeout="20" />
Also make sure you are not overriding your web.config with your machine.config to have a longer timeout.
I'm running .NET on a windows box and I would like to have a function run every night at midnight. Of course since HTTP stateless and Windows doesn't have a "cron job" type function (that I know of), I will either have to visit my site myself every night at midnight or just wait for a user to visit the site to rely on it being updated.
Is there an alternative to this that I can create where something will automatically run at a certain time?
I'm pretty sure that Windows' task scheduler can do most things that cron can do. But I might be missing something.
Edit: Reached at Settings -> Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks
If none of the other answers work for you, here's an option:
There are a bunch of server monitoring services out there that will make an http call to your site at regular intervals (every minute if you like). You can get 5 minute intervals for free on some of them.
Create a password protected page, that performs your function (if it hasn't been done yet today) and point that service at it.
At least this way you won't have to write anything additional, and you can rest easy knowing it doesn't rely on your home machine.
Jeff Attwood at some point in the podcast mentioned a dirty hack to use the Cache Expiration Callback to fake this.
He'd insert an item in .Net's Cache, with an expiration set to 2 hours, and a callback to get called once the item expired, and that was his cron.
I think this was the article:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNETService.aspx?display=Print
It sucks if you ask me, but for a shared hosting solution, I can't think of anything much better.
Also, there are external cron services that you give a URL to and they will "ping" it regularly, like: (these are not free)
http://webcron.org/
http://www.webbasedcron.com/
Here's a starting point to programmatically add/delete and manage tasks in the Task Scheduler.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/taskscheduler.aspx
If you have command-line access you could try the "at" command, which is like an ultra-light cron:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313565
you can also take a look at Quartz .Net http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/ which is a scheduler
The windows equivalent of cron is At. If you have access to the machine.
Use the Timer class to create a timer that periodically calls a method to be executed.
A static timer can be started in the Application_Start event in the Global class. Because the timer uses an interval rather than an absolute time, you'll have to calculate the time interval until midnight and set the Interval property accordingly.
It looks like GoDaddy has provisions for this, but There Is More Than One Way To Do It:
When you install Drupal it needs you to set up a cron job, and I've found out that the project members have documented this step throughly. Go to http://drupal.org/cron for more information, and remember to read http://drupal.org/node/31506 for specific Windows information.
If everything else fails, google for "web cron job" and use a commercial "cron job" service. Choose carefully, don't get ripped off.
I'm also facing the same issue. I want to run ASP.NET with MSSQL at GoDaddy. But they don't have scheule task for windows hosting. After reading the post, I did my own google and found this free web cron job scheduler:
I just tried and it works perfectly...well almost. The job expires in 1 year.
http://www.setcronjob.com/
Hope it helps.
Searching for an answer to the same question, I found this post (quartz-net-with-asp-net) with setup instruction for Quartz.NET ("Enterprise Job Scheduler for .NET Platform", from their website) even from inside an ASP.NET application.
Added it here mainly for reference.
Why not install cygwin and use cron itself?
here is a pdf guide on setting it up:
http://csc.csudh.edu/kleyba/cygwin-cron.pdf