SilverStripe Queued Jobs Module

Maintainer Contact

Marcus Nyeholt

Requirements

SilverStripe 4.x
Access to create cron jobs

Version info

The master branch of this module is currently aiming for SilverStripe 4.x compatibility

Documentation

See http://github.com/symbiote/silverstripe-queuedjobs/wiki/ for more complete documentation

The Queued Jobs module provides a framework for SilverStripe developers to define long running processes that should be run as background tasks. This asynchronous processing allows users to continue using the system while long running tasks proceed when time permits. It also lets developers set these processes to be executed in the future.

The module comes with

A section in the CMS for viewing a list of currently running jobs or scheduled jobs.
An abstract skeleton class for defining your own jobs.
A task that is executed as a cronjob for collecting and executing jobs.
A pre-configured job to cleanup the QueuedJobDescriptor database table.

Quick Usage Overview

Install the cronjob needed to manage all the jobs within the system. It is best to have this execute as the same user as your webserver - this prevents any problems with file permissions.

*/1 * * * * /path/to/silverstripe/vendor/bin/sake dev/tasks/ProcessJobQueueTask

If your code is to make use of the 'long' jobs, ie that could take days to process, also install another task that processes this queue. Its time of execution can be left a little longer.

*/15 * * * * /path/to/silverstripe/vendor/bin/sake dev/tasks/ProcessJobQueueTask queue=large

From your code, add a new job for execution.

use Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService;

$publish = new PublishItemsJob(21);
QueuedJobService::singleton()->queueJob($publish);

To schedule a job to be executed at some point in the future, pass a date through with the call to queueJob The following will run the publish job in 1 day's time from now.

use SilverStripe\ORM\FieldType\DBDatetime;
use Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService;

$publish = new PublishItemsJob(21);
QueuedJobService::singleton()
    ->queueJob($publish, DBDatetime::create()->setValue(DBDatetime::now()->getTimestamp() + 86400)->Rfc2822());

Using Doorman for running jobs

Doorman is included by default, and allows for asynchronous task processing.

This requires that you are running an a unix based system, or within some kind of environment emulator such as cygwin.

In order to enable this, configure the ProcessJobQueueTask to use this backend.

In your YML set the below:

---
Name: localproject
After: '#queuedjobsettings'
---
SilverStripe\Core\Injector\Injector:
  Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService:
    properties:
      queueRunner: %$DoormanRunner

Using Gearman for running jobs

Make sure gearmand is installed
Get the gearman module from https://github.com/nyeholt/silverstripe-gearman
Create a _config/queuedjobs.yml file in your project with the following declaration

---
Name: localproject
After: '#queuedjobsettings'
---
SilverStripe\Core\Injector\Injector:
  QueueHandler:
    class: Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\GearmanQueueHandler

Run the gearman worker using php gearman/gearman_runner.php in your SS root dir

This will cause all queuedjobs to trigger immediate via a gearman worker (src/workers/JobWorker.php) EXCEPT those with a StartAfter date set, for which you will STILL need the cron settings from above

Using `QueuedJob::IMMEDIATE` jobs

Queued jobs can be executed immediately (instead of being limited by cron's 1 minute interval) by using a file based notification system. This relies on something like inotifywait to monitor a folder (by default this is SILVERSTRIPE_CACHE_DIR/queuedjobs) and triggering the ProcessJobQueueTask as above but passing job=$filename as the argument. An example script is in queuedjobs/scripts that will run inotifywait and then call the ProcessJobQueueTask when a new job is ready to run.

Note - if you do NOT have this running, make sure to set QueuedJobService::$use_shutdown_function = true; so that immediate mode jobs don't stall. By setting this to true, immediate jobs will be executed after the request finishes as the php script ends.

Default Jobs

Some jobs should always be either running or queued to run, things like data refreshes or periodic clean up jobs, we call these Default Jobs. Default jobs are checked for at the end of each job queue process, using the job type and any fields in the filter to create an SQL query e.g.

ArbitraryName:
  type: 'ScheduledExternalImportJob'
  filter:
    JobTitle: 'Scheduled import from Services'

Will become:

QueuedJobDescriptor::get()->filter([
  'type' => 'ScheduledExternalImportJob',
  'JobTitle' => 'Scheduled import from Services'
]);

This query is checked to see if there's at least 1 healthly (new, run, wait or paused) job matching the filter. If there's not and recreate is true in the yml config we use the construct array as params to pass to a new job object e.g:

ArbitraryName:
  type: 'ScheduledExternalImportJob'
  filter:
    JobTitle: 'Scheduled import from Services'
  recreate: 1
  construct:
    repeat: 300
    contentItem: 100
      target: 157

If the above job is missing it will be recreated as:

Injector::inst()->createWithArgs(ScheduledExternalImportJob::class, $construct[])

Pausing Default Jobs

If you need to stop a default job from raising alerts and being recreated, set an existing copy of the job to Paused in the CMS.

YML config

Default jobs are defined in yml config the sample below covers the options and expected values

SilverStripe\Core\Injector\Injector:
  Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService:
    properties:
      defaultJobs:
        # This key is used as the title for error logs and alert emails
        ArbitraryName:
          # The job type should be the class name of a job REQUIRED
          type: 'ScheduledExternalImportJob'
          # This plus the job type is used to create the SQL query REQUIRED
          filter:
            # 1 or more Fieldname: 'value' sets that will be queried on REQUIRED
            #  These can be valid ORM filter
            JobTitle: 'Scheduled import from Services'
          # Sets whether the job will be recreated or not OPTIONAL
          recreate: 1
          # Set the email address to send the alert to if not set site admin email is used OPTIONAL
          email: 'admin@email.com'
          # Parameters set on the recreated object OPTIONAL
          construct:
            # 1 or more Fieldname: 'value' sets be passed to the constructor OPTIONAL
            repeat: 300
            title: 'Scheduled import from Services'
        # Minimal implementation will send alerts but not recreate
        AnotherTitle:
          type: 'AJob'
          filter:
            JobTitle: 'A job'

Configuring the CleanupJob

By default the CleanupJob is disabled. To enable it, set the following in your YML:

Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Jobs\CleanupJob:
  is_enabled: true

You will need to trigger the first run manually in the UI. After that the CleanupJob is run once a day.

You can configure this job to clean up based on the number of jobs, or the age of the jobs. This is configured with the cleanup_method setting - current valid values are "age" (default) and "number". Each of these methods will have a value associated with it - this is an integer, set with cleanup_value. For "age", this will be converted into days; for "number", it is the minimum number of records to keep, sorted by LastEdited. The default value is 30, as we are expecting days.

You can determine which JobStatuses are allowed to be cleaned up. The default setting is to clean up "Broken" and "Complete" jobs. All other statuses can be configured with cleanup_statuses. You can also define query_limit to limit the number of rows queried/deleted by the cleanup job (defaults to 100k).

The default configuration looks like this:

Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Jobs\CleanupJob:
  is_enabled: false
  query_limit: 100000
  cleanup_method: "age"
  cleanup_value: 30
  cleanup_statuses:
    - Broken
    - Complete

Health Checking

Jobs track their execution in steps - as the job runs it increments the "steps" that have been run. Periodically jobs are checked to ensure they are healthy. This asserts the count of steps on a job is always increasing between health checks. By default health checks are performed when a worker picks starts running a queue.

In a multi-worker environment this can cause issues when health checks are performed too frequently. You can disable the automatic health check with the following configuration:

Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService:
  disable_health_check: true

In addition to the config setting there is a task that can be used with a cron to ensure that unhealthy jobs are detected:

*/5 * * * * /path/to/silverstripe/vendor/bin/sake dev/tasks/CheckJobHealthTask

Troubleshooting

To make sure your job works, you can first try to execute the job directly outside the framework of the queues - this can be done by manually calling the setup() and process() methods. If it works fine under these circumstances, try having getJobType() return QueuedJob::IMMEDIATE to have execution work immediately, without being persisted or executed via cron. If this works, next make sure your cronjob is configured and executing correctly.

If defining your own job classes, be aware that when the job is started on the queue, the job class is constructed without parameters being passed; this means if you accept constructor args, you must detect whether they're present or not before using them. See this issue and this wiki page for more information.

If defining your own jobs, please ensure you follow PSR conventions, i.e. use "YourVendor" rather than "SilverStripe".

Ensure that notifications are configured so that you can get updates or stalled or broken jobs. You can set the notification email address in your config as below:

SilverStripe\Control\Email\Email:
  queued_job_admin_email: support@mycompany.com

Long running jobs are running multiple times!

A long running job may fool the system into thinking it has gone away (ie the job health check fails because currentStep hasn't been incremented). To avoid this scenario, you can set $this->currentStep = -1 in your job's constructor, to prevent any health checks detecting the job.

Performance configuration

By default this task will run until either 256mb or the limit specified by php_ini('memory_limit') is reached.

NOTE: This was increased to 256MB in 4.x to handle the increase in memory usage by framework.

You can adjust this with the below config change

# Force memory limit to 256 megabytes
Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService\QueuedJobsService:
  # Accepts b, k, m, or b suffixes
  memory_limit: 256m

You can also enforce a time limit for each queue, after which the task will attempt a restart to release all resources. By default this is disabled, so you must specify this in your project as below:

# Force limit to 10 minutes
Symbiote\QueuedJobs\Services\QueuedJobService\QueuedJobsService:
  time_limit: 600

Indexes

ALTER TABLE `QueuedJobDescriptor` ADD INDEX ( `JobStatus` , `JobType` )

Contributing

Translations

Translations of the natural language strings are managed through a third party translation interface, transifex.com. Newly added strings will be periodically uploaded there for translation, and any new translations will be merged back to the project source code.

Please use https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/silverstripe-queuedjobs to contribute translations, rather than sending pull requests with YAML files.

tomstgeorge/silverstripe-queuedjobs