I have used Azure Schedulers before for quick jobs before. It targets a URL which is ASPX page or WebApi and it did the job.
Now I have a job that takes up to 15-20 minutes. Of course, I am getting timeout error after 30 seconds.
I'm trying to avoid creating a Windows Service or some console application that would run on Azure VM, rather have a non-UI application that runs in the background.
Do you have any suggestion what should I do?
You should use an Azure WebJob for this. WebJobs support simple scheduling via a cron expression (details here). Basically you upload a simple script file or exe that performs the work you want done, upload it to your WebApp along with a cron schedule expression, and Azure WebJobs will make sure it runs on schedule.
For your scenario, you'll want to create a "Continuous" WebJob and ensure you've enabled "Always On" which ensures the background job continues running (i.e. it isn't request triggered).
WebJobs sure is a good solutions, but it will share resources with its attached Web App.
You could consider using an Azure Cloud Service. I do that myself for longer running tasks, that are more CPU intensive.
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For long running WebJobs, you have to tinker with the Timeout value (by default 2 minutes) or make sure your Webjob makes some Console.Writes.
To achieve that, go to the Web App Settings > Application Settings and add the following configurations:
WEBJOBS_IDLE_TIMEOUT - Time in seconds after which we'll abort a running triggered job's process if it's in idle, has no cpu time or output.
SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT - Time in milisecods. By default, when your build process launches some command, it's allowed to run for up to 60 seconds without producing any output. If that is not long enough, you can make it longer, e.g. to make it 10 minutes:
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I need an Azure VM (Ubuntu) to do some task (java application) every 10 minutes. Because the task lasts usually less than a minute I would save money if could start the machine every 10 minutes and stop it when the task accomplishes. I learned that I can schedule start and stop times in automation account, but more optimal would be to stop the VM in the very moment that task is completed. Is there a simple way to do that?
This really sounds like a job for Azure Batch. If you are looking for an IaaS solution, Azure Batch will do the job for you. Have a look at it: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/batch/#overview.
It allows you to use VM's with your preferred OS (in Azure Batch it is called a node), and run a set of tasks. Once finished, the VM will be de-allocated.
So each node runs a set of pools, in each pool you have a job, and in each job you can have tasks. A task can be for example a cmd line that runs a specific app. So for instance you could just run example.exe 1 2 on a windows OS or the equivalent command line for an Ubuntu OS.
The power here is that it will allocate the tasks to run on the VM when you add them to the job, and then the VM will be disposed off once finished, and you would only pay for the compute time.
The disadvantages of this is that it is a stateless VM, therefore anything that you need installing or storing you would have to use alternative methods. Azure Batch allows you to pre-install a program (for example your Java application) each time it initiates. Also if you are using files and/or expecting files to be created, you would need a blob storage to support this. So if you are expecting it to use a certain amount of files, store them on blob storage and then write back to the blob storage if your program is doing this.
Finally your scheduler, this really depends on how you want to deal with it, if you have a local server or a server on Azure that is already running 24/7 you can add a scheduled job to the scheduler and run a program that will add the task to the Azure Batch. Or if you don't mind using Azure Functions, you can just add a timer Azure Function that will add a task to the job. There are multiple ways of dealing with this, you may already have an existing solution.
Hope you find this useful!
I have an Azure webjob created using the SDK that runs hourly. The job runs, and works fine, but when I look at the job in the portal it always shows Failed. I can run the job from the Debug Console and everything appears fine. When run from the console the job typically takes seconds to run, but when run on the schedule it usually shows 12-20 minutes, before it fails.
How can I get more details as to why this is failing? Do I need to be telling webjobs somehow the task is finished and it's waiting on me?
Thanks,
Russ
Webjob Failure
This error happens if the job uses TimerTrigger.
If the job is long-running use WEBJOBS_IDLE_TIMEOUT and SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT in Azure app settings instead of web.config.
If the job is not long-running, it should have scheduled timers less than 2 minutes, which will probably work well for testing only.
Finally, the ultimate solution is to use Basic or Standard offering of AppPlan.
In that case you can ENABLE Always On to keep the container loaded all the time.
However, WEBJOBS_IDLE_TIMEOUT and SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT must also be set as described above. Continuous WebJobs or of WebJobs triggered using a CRON (TimerTrigger) expression without Always On, will not run reliably.
For more details, you could refer to this article.
I have a C# console application which extracts 15GB FireBird database file on a server location to multiple files and loads the data from files to SQLServer database. The console application uses System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel class to perform parallel execution of the dataload from files to sqlserver database.
It is a weekly process and it takes 6 hours to complete.
What is best option to move this (console application) process to azure cloud - WebJob or WorkerRole or Any other cloud service ?
How to reduce the execution time (6 hrs) after moving to cloud ?
How to implement the suggested option ? Please provide pointers or code samples etc.
Your help in detail comments is very much appreciated.
Thanks
Bhanu.
let me give some thought on this question of yours
"What is best option to move this (console application) process to
azure cloud - WebJob or WorkerRole or Any other cloud service ?"
First you can achieve the task with both WebJob and WorkerRole, but i would suggest you to go with WebJob.
PROS about WebJob is:
Deployment time is quicker, you can turn your console app without any change into a continues running webjob within mintues (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/)
Build in timer support, where WorkerRole you will need to handle on your own
Fault tolerant, when your WebJob fail, there is built-in resume logic
You might want to check out Azure Functions. You pay only for the processing time you use and there doesn't appear to be a maximum run time (unlike AWS Lambda).
They can be set up on a schedule or kicked off from other events.
If you are already doing work in parallel you could break out some of the parallel tasks into separate azure functions. Aside from that, how to speed things up would require specific knowledge of what you are trying to accomplish.
In the past when I've tried to speed up work like this, I would start by spitting out log messages during the processing that contain the current time or that calculate the duration (using the StopWatch class). Then find out which areas can be improved. The slowness may also be due to slowdown on the SQL Server side. More investigation would be needed on your part. But the first step is always capturing metrics.
Since Azure Functions can scale out horizontally, you might want to first break out the data from the files into smaller chunks and let the functions handle each chunk. Then spin up multiple parallel processing of those chunks. Be sure not to spin up more than your SQL Server can handle.
I have a Scheduled Azure WebJob which runs every 5 mins. It's not clear what happens if the running times takes 10 mins. Is a new one started parallel to the one still running, or is it not started until the previous one has finished?
From this answer What happens when a scheduled WebJob runs for a long time :
As i understand it scheduled webjobs is just triggered webjobs that is run using Azure Scheduler, if you open Azure Scheduler in management portal you can see the webjobs and even configure them in more detail. (You can see the log too which would give you the simple answer to your question).
If you like to look at whats going on your scheduled webjob is run as a Triggered webjob by Kudu, if you look in the Kudu source you will see that a lockfile is created when a job is started, and if you try to start another job a ConflictException is thrown if there is already a lock file.
The Azure scheduler calls your job using a webhook that catches the ConflictException and gives you the "Error_WebJobAlreadyRunning" warning which will tell you: "Cannot start a new run since job is already running."
I've created a simple Azure WebJob that uses a QueueInput trigger. It deployed without any problems and I've schedule it via the management portal so that it 'Runs continuously'
Initial testing seemed fine, with the job triggering shortly after placing anything in the queue.
By chance I then left it about a day before placing anything else in the queue. This time the job hadn't triggered within a few minutes so I logged in to the portal to view the invocation logs - which showed that the job had just that moment been triggered.
That seemed too much of a coincidence so I left it another day before placing something in the queue. Again, the job didn't trigger. I left it overnight and by morning it still hadn't triggered.
When I logged in to the management portal this time I noticed that the job was marked as 'Aborted' on the WebJobs page. It was like that only for about 10 seconds before the status changed to 'Running'. And then the job immediately triggered from what was placed in the queue the night before, as expected.
As it's an alpha release I'm expecting glitches. Just wondering whether anyone else has had a similar experience.
For WebJobs SDK, your job must be running in order to listen for triggers (new queue messages, new blobs, etc). Azure Websites free tier has quotas and will put your job to sleep which means it's no longer listening on triggers. Using the site may cause it to come back to life and start listening to triggers again.
The SDK dashboard will show a warning icon next to functions if the hosting job is not running (it detects this via heartbeats).
Make sure that your website is configured with the "Always On" setting Enabled.
If your site contains continuously running jobs they may not perform reliably if this setting is disabled.
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/
By default, web sites are unloaded if they have been idle for some period of time. This lets the system conserve resources. You can enable the Always On setting for a site in Standard mode if the site needs to be loaded all the time. Because continuous web jobs may not run reliably if Always On is disabled, you should enable Always On when you have continuous web jobs running on the site.