Alternatives to timer task

[weirdyang]

Hi,

The timer task always seems to give us issues, especially after an app restart.

For example, it would generate multiple blocking activities, and I noticed the tasks seems to run consecutively vs concurrently.

Does anyone have any advice to implement a better timer task? Open to ideas and suggestions, I just require a task to run jobs on a schedule.

[Piedone]

See #760 (comment)

However, what are the "blocking activities" you see? Background tasks shouldn't block.

[weirdyang]

timer tasks when used in a workflow creates blocking activities,

[Piedone]

Those shouldn't block in the async-sync sense though, if that's what you mean, it's just that activities hooked onto a Timer task will wait for that timer to pass. This is desired, of course, and shouldn't cause any issues. Can you elaborate what kind of issues do you see, exactly?

[weirdyang]

OrchardCore/src/OrchardCore/OrchardCore.Workflows.Abstractions/Models/Workflow.cs

Line 48 in 8d403cd

public IList<BlockingActivity> BlockingActivities { get; init; } = [];

OrchardCore/src/OrchardCore.Modules/OrchardCore.Workflows/Indexes/WorkflowIndexProvider.cs

Line 17 in 8d403cd

public class WorkflowBlockingActivitiesIndex : MapIndex

Workflow blocking activities, hope that clarifies.

similar to this:
#13302
#13344

or it just generates a blocking activity that never gets unblocked/resumed. and the only way we can resolve it was by clearing the blocking activities table.