Best scheduling practice using VC++ for capture in directshow - visual-c++

I have one capture application, that performs the MP4 capture. i need to schedule this capture application to capture video of every 30 minutes (or some dynamic value).
I read the MSDN article for IReferenceClock::AdviseTime from article i am not sure but i assume will trigger event when end-time elapses. but it not seems to work . please advice me if my understanding is incorrect about it. Or is any other batter way to repeat schedule in 30 minutes to capture video??
Thanks

IReferenceClock::AdviseTime is what let's close schedule setting an event. Filters might take advantage of this internally as a part of streaming operation. For you, however, this methods is of no use. There is a number of ways to trigger an action every 30 minutes. On a running application you would typically use SetTimer + WM_TIMER API. If you want your app started every 30 minutes, Task Scheduler is here for you.

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Best way to implement background “timer” functionality in Python/Django

I am trying to implement a Django web application (on Python 3.8.5) which allows a user to create “activities” where they define an activity duration and then set the activity status to “In progress”.
The POST action to the View writes the new status, the duration and the start time (end time, based on start time and duration is also possible to add here of course).
The back-end should then keep track of the duration and automatically change the status to “Finished”.
User actions can also change the status to “Finished” before the calculated end time (i.e. the timer no longer needs to be tracked).
I am fairly new to Python so I need some advice on the smartest way to implement such a concept?
It needs to be efficient and scalable – I’m currently using a Heroku Free account so have limited system resources, but efficiency would also be important for future production implementations of course.
I have looked at the Python threading Timer, and this seems to work on a basic level, but I’ve not been able to determine what kind of constraints this places on the system – e.g. whether the spawned Timer thread might prevent the main thread from finishing and releasing resources (i.e. Heroku Dyno threads), etc.
I have read that persistence might be a problem (if the server goes down), and I haven’t found a way to cancel the timer from another process (the .cancel() method seems to rely on having the original object to cancel, and I’m not sure if this is achievable from another process).
I was also wondering about a more “background” approach, i.e. a single process which is constantly checking the database looking for activity records which have reached their end time and swapping the status.
But what would be the best way of implementing such a server?
Is it practical to read the database every second to find records with an end time of “now”? I need the status to change in real-time when the end time is reached.
Is something like Celery a good option, or is it overkill for a single process like this?
As I said I’m fairly new to these technologies, so I may be missing other obvious solutions – please feel free to enlighten me!
Thanks in advance.
To achieve this you need some kind of scheduling tasks functionality. For a fast simpler implementation is a good solution to use the Timer object from the
Threading module.
A more complete solution is tu use Celery. If you are new, deeping in it will give you a good value start using celery as a queue manager distributing your work easily across several threads or process.
You mentioned that you want it to be efficient and scalable, so I guess you will want to implement similar functionalities that will require multiprocessing and schedule so for that reason my recommendation is to use celery.
You can integrate it into your Django application easily following the documentation Integrate Django with Celery.

Graceful ramp down of user load in locust

Is there a way to do graceful ramp down of my user load while running load tests using locust framework ?
For e.g. using the below command -
I want to run a single user for a time period of 5 minutes in a loop, but here what happens is that the last iteration end abruptly with lets say 5 requests on some of the tasks and 4 on some others.
Yes! There is a new flag (developed by yours truly :) called --stop-timeout that will make locust wait for the users to complete (up to the specified time span)
There is (as of now) no way to do actual ramp down (gradually reducing the load by shutting down users over time), but hopefully this is enough for you. Such a feature might be added at a later time.
You can create your own Shape that allows you to specify how many user should be present at any time of the test.
This is explained there: https://github.com/locustio/locust/pull/1505

Process all file change events within specified time frame with TPL Dataflow

I am monitoring multiple log files across multiple directories. I need to trigger an SSIS package when a file has fired an onchange event. Easy enough, but the complication is I don't want to trigger the SSIS package every time there is a change on the file. I want to wait and capture at least 5 minutes worth of changes to a specific file.
Having used FilewSystemWatcher before I know it triggers each onchange event in a new thread - My thought is to pass these events into a TPL block and have it wait for a specified time interval and then trigger an SSIS package. Basically triggering a related SSIS package every 5 minutes if there have been file change events.
If anyone could point me in the right direction as a starting point I would greatly appreciate it!
I can't tell from your question whether TPL Dataflow is a requirement or just an idea.
I'd probably keep it simple and avoid TPL dataflow. Just poll using a System.Threading.Timer and have it check System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime on the file.
If you want to get fancy you could use Rx, convert the FilewSystemWatcher event to an Observable, and use the Buffer(TimeSpan) method.
TPL Dataflow doesn't have any intrinsic support for time windows you'd have to roll your own, probably using one of the aforementioned two methods to build it out. My experience with TPL Dataflow is that it's too big and cumbersome for small tasks, and too rudimentary for big tasks, so I'd avoid taking that approach.

Display a Chrome desktop notification every day at specific time

I'd like to write an extension that displays a desktop notification every day at a specified time. Having a quick look through the Chrome APIs, it seems like the only way to do this would be to:
create a background page for my extension,
use setInterval() with a sufficiently low resolution to not tax the CPU (even 5 min is fine),
when interval fires, check if the current time is after the desired time,
ensure that the user has not already been displayed the notification today.
(The details of the last step are irrelevant to my question, just put in to show I realize I need to prevent "flapping" of the notice).
This seems rather indirect and potentially expensive though; is there any way around this? Is the background page needed?
I suppose I could just call setTimeout() and only fire the event once (by calculating how long between now & desired time), then call it again after the notification is shown. For some reason that sounds more "brittle", though I'm not sure why...
I think you will want the background page to do this smoothly. You can't use a content script because you need to keep the "state"/timer.
So when background page first loads (browser start) you work out the current time and the offset to the next notification time and setInterval to that exact interval. That way you won't need to poll every five minutes and/or work out if you've shown the message. You simply show it at the exact time required. This has to be far more efficient, effective and cleaner than polling. At notification you just reset the interval again.
Some sample functions here:
setTimeout but for a given time
From reading the above post and from a quick search on the net it appears that you should have no problem calling setInterval for an interval such as once a day. Calvin suggests 25 days!
That is how I would approach it.
EDIT: Since posting one thing that has sprung to mind is what happens if a PC gets hibernated for n hours? I need to test this myself for a similar project so I will update once I've had a chance to test this out.

How to define frequency of a job in application by users?

I have an application that has to launch jobs repeatingly. But (yes, that would have been to easy without a but...) I would like users to define their backup frequency in application.
In worst case, they would have to choose between :
weekly,
daily,
every 12 hours,
every 6 hours,
hourly
In best case, they should be able to use crontab expressions (see documentation for example)
How to do this? Do I launch a job every minutes that check for last execution time, frequency and then launches another job if needed? Do I create a sort of queue that will be executed by a masterjob?
Any clues, ideas, opinions, best pratices, experiences are welcome!
EDIT : Solved this problem using Akka scheduler. Ok, this is a technical solution not a design answer but still everything works great.
Each user defined repetition is an actor that send messages every period to a new actor to execute the actual job.
There may be two ways to do this depending on your requirements/architecture:
If you can only use Play:
The user creates the job and the frequency it will run (crontab, whatever).
On saving the job, you calculate the first time it will have to be run. You then add an entry to a table JOBS with the execution time, job id, and any other information required. This is required as Play is stateless and information must be stored in the DB for later retrieval.
You have a job that queries the table for entries whose execution date is less than now. Retrieves the first, runs it, removes it from the table and adds a new entry for next execution. You should keep some execution counter so if a task fails (which means the entry is not removed from DB) it won't block execution of the other tasks by the job trying again and again.
The frequency of this job is set to run every second. That way while there is information in the table, you should execute the request around as often as they are required. As Play won't spawn a new job while the current one is working if you have enough tasks this one job will serve all. If not, it will be killed at some point and restored when required.
Of course, the crons of the users will not be too precise, as you have to account for you own cron delays plus execution delays on all the tasks in queue, which will be run sequentially. Not the best approach, unless you somehow disallow crons which run every second or more often than every minute (to be safe). Doing a check on execution time of the crons to kill them if they are over a certain amount of time would be a good idea.
If you can use more than Play:
The better alternative I believe is to use Quartz (see this) to create a future execution when the user creates the job, and reproram it once the execution is over.
There was a discussion on google-groups about it. As far as I remember you must define a job which start every 6 hours and check which backups must be done. So you must remember when the last backup job was finished and make the control yourself. I'm unsure if Quartz can handle such a requirement.
I looked in the source-code (always a good source ;-)) and found a method every, where I think this should be do what you want. How ever I'm unsure if this is a clever design, because if you have 1000 user you will have then 1000 Jobs. I'm unsure if Play was build to handle such a large number of jobs.
[Update] For cron-expressions you should have a look into JobPlugin.scheduleForCRON()
There are several ways to solve this.
If you don't have a really huge load of jobs, I'd just persist them to a table using the required flexibility. Then check all of them every hour (or the lowest interval you support) and run those eligible. Simple.
Or, if you prefer to use cron syntax anyway, just write (export) jobs to a user crontab using a wrapper which calls back to your running app, or starts the job in a standalone process if that's possible.

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