Problem with notification scheduling in WEB Applications

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Context

I'm currently implementing a feature to schedule notifications for a specific period through a web form using PHP and Firebase.

To send the notification I use Firebase and it sends notifications to Android/Ios.

To schedule the notification I use the AT linux service, as it seems to suit better than cron, as cron runs at certain frequencies and AT does not, it runs at a specific time.

man page about the AT: man page AT

Sample code

/usr/bin/php `send_notification.php` | at 2021-07-11 15:40

This will create a file on linux that will run in the period 2021-07-11 15:40 only once.

Problems

The AT service, like CRON, creates files inside a directory on the operating system that represent the jobs.

1 - If a machine on AWS is scaled, jobs would likely be duplicated and consequently send notifications more than once. (Note: I don't know much about machine scaling, but I believe it should happen)

2 - And if the machine is in downtime due to the inclusion of some functionality or something like that, I believe that the way it is currently the job would not be executed.

3 - Another problem, but not the main one, would be if I was using a docker container. As Ubuntu + PHP are inside the container, the job files would probably be lost if I restarted the container, so in this case I believe that a solution would be to use volume, but that would not be my problem now, as currently the application uses only one machine on AWS EB with the PHP image.

Doubts

  • Is there any solution I can apply to solve this duplicate job problem using PHP?

  • Is the approach using AT the most suitable? I see a lot of people talking to use CRON, but CRON will run the job several times and for me that's not what I'm looking for.

at-job amazon-elastic-beanstalk scheduled-tasks cron php
1 Answers

I think you need a place where scheduled and finished notifications will be persisted, independently on what you are using, cron or at.

If I had such a task, I would stay with a solution like this: run special script, "scheduler.php" each 1 (or more, e.g. 5) mins by cron, which will check some log file(or remote database in case of several machines) and look if there are any new lines. If new line present and it contains timestamp in the past and status "sceduled", than script will lock it and run your "sender.php". After that it will mark the line as "done". Each line in a storage should contain a timestamp to run and one of three statuses "scheduled", "running" and "done".

With such approach you could plan new notifications by adding a line with needed time and status "scheduled" to the storage. Note, that there can be a little delay between scheduled time and actual notification depending on the cron interval, but I suppose it is not critical.

This will allow you to run any number of crons on different machines and guarantee that each job will be done once.

Important: if you will adopt this scheme, be sure that your scheduler.php reads and updates a storage in a single atomic operation, to prevent race conditions between several crons. File locks, or "select for update" will do.

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