Delayed Jobs with suspend

[mindrunner]

Description

For testing purpose, I have one of my services running on my local computer which suspends over night.

There is only one cron job which is supposed to run early afternoon:
HARVEST_INTERVAL='0 13 * * *'

Jobs are currently executed around 10pm-11pm. Cannot find a pattern actually. I suspect suspend is somehow the issue, but idk why... Time in container is always correct.

Application is dockerized and lives in a docker-compose setup if that matters. TZ env is set correctly and generally everything is working fine (same app does not show that behavior on a 24/7 running server.

Any ideas?

Screenshots

No response

Additional information

No response

[intcreator]

your computer suspends on a schedule? does it automatically un-suspend? my guess is the node-cron function that gets the next time is being confused by your computer's suspension schedule.

here's what the getNextDate function does:

		/**
		 * Get next date matching the specified cron time.
		 *
		 * Algorithm:
		 * - Start with a start date and a parsed crontime.
		 * - Loop until 5 seconds have passed, or we found the next date.
		 * - Within the loop:
		 *   - If it took longer than 5 seconds to select a date, throw an exception.
		 *   - Find the next month to run at.
		 *   - Find the next day of the month to run at.
		 *   - Find the next day of the week to run at.
		 *   - Find the next hour to run at.
		 *   - Find the next minute to run at.
		 *   - Find the next second to run at.
		 *   - Check that the chosen time does not equal the current execution.
		 * - Return the selected date object.
		 */

if you can log out the results of getNextDate every few minutes before and after your computer sleeps that might help narrow down the problem

[mindrunner]

I suspend my computer when I go to sleep and i wake the computer up when I start working next morning. I will have a look at your suggestion and get back here if I am able to better reproduce it.

[mindrunner]

I created a minimal-reproducable example with both node-cron and croner (comment asking for that by @Hexagon was deleted apparently). Bot libraries show exactly the same behaviour.

import { CronJob } from 'cron'
import { Cron } from 'croner'

const trigger = (job: string): void => {
    logger.info(`${job} triggered at ${dayjs().toISOString()}`)
}

const cronJobTest = (): void => {
    trigger('cron  ')
}
const cronTest = (): void => {
    trigger('croner')
}

export const start = (): void => {
    cronJob = new CronJob(config.cron.testInterval, cronJobTest, null, true)
    cron = new Cron(config.cron.testInterval, cronTest)
}

config.cron.testInterval comes from an environment:
TEST_INTERVAL='0 13 * * *'

Dockerized into an image based on node:18-alpine and run with compose:

version: '3.5'

services:

  app:
    build:
        context: /home/le/src/cron-test
        dockerfile: ./docker/Dockerfile
    restart: always
    environment:
        TZ: Europe/Berlin
    env_file:
      - .env
    command: [ "run.sh" ]

Wait couple of days with computer going to sleep over night more or less and then checking the log:

❯ docker logs -t cron-test-app-1
2023-06-21T07:34:50.008929319Z info: Starting cron-test...
2023-06-21T11:00:00.095505537Z info: cron   triggered at 2023-06-21T11:00:00.095Z
2023-06-21T11:00:00.096350129Z info: croner triggered at 2023-06-21T11:00:00.095Z
2023-06-22T19:56:37.466788580Z info: cron   triggered at 2023-06-22T19:56:37.466Z
2023-06-22T19:56:37.467895614Z info: croner triggered at 2023-06-22T19:56:37.467Z
2023-06-23T21:01:22.030012103Z info: cron   triggered at 2023-06-23T21:01:22.028Z
2023-06-23T21:01:22.032067341Z info: croner triggered at 2023-06-23T21:01:22.031Z

Note: 11am UTC is 1pm Europe/Berlin. So the first trigger is on point, 2nd and 3rd are 8 and 10 hours late (which might have been the time the computer was asleep, but I am not sure about that.

[Hexagon]

Thanks for great research @mindrunner 💯

I think the problem is that setTimeout (used internally by node-cron and other similar libraries) is paused when the computer (and/or container) is suspended, so if next run is 10 000 000 ms away and the computer is suspended 8 000 000 ms, the function will be run 8 000 000 ms too late. Need to test this with and without container to see if it's a docker issue or general issue.

Docker or not, the solution would be to chop the waiting into smaller chunks, and if the chunks are small enough, there will be no problem when the computer is suspended.

( The node-cron-folks do not like it when I comment their issues (citing an email i got) "advertising competing libraries". Thats why my question got deleted. To whom it may concern - sorry, will try to avoid that. )