Ad hoc Tasks and Performance

Ad hoc Tasks and Performance

by Thorsten Bieser -
Number of replies: 2

After the covid 19 shutdown of the schools there is A LOT more load on our Moodleservers. While digging for performance issues we found the cronjobs as performance killers. Escpecially the ad hoc tasks. First we changed the settings where possible to the late afternoon and the night in the automated tasks configuration. But thats obviously not possible for the ad hoc Tasks.

But there is a possibility of reduce the concurrent task to only one or to complete deactivate it.

What is your recommendation?

What impact has the deactivation of the ad hoc task?

Can we disable them in the morning when the load is high and activate them again in the afternoon?

Are there any more ideas you will share to improve the cronjobs?

Thanks in advance

cheers

Thorsten


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In reply to Thorsten Bieser

Re: Ad hoc Tasks and Performance

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Well, the big thing will be no emails from forums - although, ad-hoc tasks seem to be used for more and more activities.

What makes you think that ad-hoc tasks are an issue for your system? What have you found?

It occurs to me that they won't go away. If you stop them running you'll just have a much large number to process later. Cron activity is part of the overall spec of your system. I run a clustered system and one of the "front end" servers is entirely dedicated to running cron.
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Ad hoc Tasks and Performance

by Thorsten Bieser -

Hi Howard,

thanks for your Tipp with the forum messages.  I think we should check the notfications configuration. There are a huge numbers of entries in the table where mails are send. Maybe we can change everthing to "offline" in the email column to reduce mailing.


>What makes you think that ad-hoc tasks are an issue for your system? What have you found?

Thats quite easy. We checked the load of cronjobs with ad-hoc tasks enabled and disabled : )

And you´re right. After enable it again, the load explode until the tasks have run for the first time. But when you do this in the Evening there are less users online an the system is still available.

cheers Thorsten

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