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The perfect open-source task scheduler

Posted on 26 Feb 2010 at 14:47

An epic quest to find the perfect open-source task scheduler for his company tests Simon Brock's resilience

The reason we gave up wasn’t really the software’s fault, it was ours. We use cron, and other people use equivalent software on Windows, because it’s so easy: we don’t need to set up scheduled jobs every day, but when we do we want it to be easy.

Unfortunately, we found Job Scheduler too difficult. It exposes the fact that it can do everything to you at every step, meaning that simple operations weren’t actually that simple. Also, although the system is managed via a web interface, we found that hard to access from different machines or from different networks.

None of these problems were insurmountable, but I think ultimately that our “eyes were bigger than our bellies”, and we didn’t really want all its abilities along with the features we did want.

What next: GNUbatch

So far this was going badly: we’d rejected every package we’d looked at. We didn’t like some solutions because they lacked resilience, and we didn’t like the more resilient solution because it was too complicated.

We then discovered a package called GNUbatch. It’s a mature product in the job-scheduling arena, but relatively new to the open-source community. It used to be a commercial package called Xi-Batch and it’s been actively developed since 1990, before being made open-source in 2009.

Before you all start rushing for your package manager, be aware that you probably won’t find GNUbatch in repositories, so you’ll have to download the source code and compile it yourself.

GNUbatch is a mature product in the job-scheduling arena, but relatively new to the open-source community

Also be aware that this is good old-fashioned software: GNUbatch doesn’t use a relational database to store its information; it isn’t written in Java; and if you want you can control it all from a command line, although it does have GUI, Windows and web interfaces as well.

So what can GNUbatch do? It lets you set up jobs to run on one machine or many machines, and each job can have a start time and be set to repeat at various intervals – with a little bit of thought you can also restrict it to working days, avoiding weekends and holidays, and have it understand more sophisticated scheduling options such as “the last day of the working month”.

Jobs can be chained together, with optional paths based on errors, and these chains can be created to span multiple machines. For example, you could have a reporting task that runs on a collection of machines, which then causes a single job to run on another machine to aggregate the results into a report.

All results of jobs are logged as text files and these logs can be manipulated later. All in all, we found that GNUbatch did exactly what we wanted, and while it did have a steepish learning curve, that was mitigated by the fact that it has a substantial collection of readable manuals.

So we eventually found a solution to our search for a job scheduling package, after struggling with the classic open-source problem of too many to choose from. If you have a similar need to ours, look at Job Scheduler and GNUbatch.