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Redefining Task Scheduling: Moving Beyond Traditional CRON Jobs
Introduction:
In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, the use of traditional CRON jobs with PHP scripts has been a common practice for scheduling tasks. However, as projects grow in complexity and scale, issues arise that necessitate a reevaluation of this approach. In this article, we will delve into the challenges faced when relying on conventional CRON jobs and explore alternative open-source tools that provide more flexibility, control, and scalability for task scheduling.
What we are doing and the Problem:
Until today, we have written over 120+ PHP scripts and added them to the cron job server with various conditions such as every day, every 2 hours, every 5 minutes, and even every second. However, we assumed that everything would work fine after the production deployment, but unfortunately, that was not the case. With a total of 120+ cron jobs and 30+ critical ones, we discovered many jobs had failed due to alternative triggers caused by running on a single server or a DB load.
Furthermore, we faced additional challenges as we lacked a dashboard to monitor the failures and successes of all the cron jobs. This absence of comprehensive monitoring made it difficult for us to identify and address issues promptly…
