SubFolders and Multi-Select

Hello,

I was just wondering if there is any desire to eventually allow the creation of subfolders in 24x7 Scheduler especially now that you are starting to allow folder level operations like enable/disable all jobs in a folder or move all jobs in a folder.

Also, allowing multiple select of jobs for enable/disable/delete/move using the ctrl key would also be a nice feature

Thanks,

John

Hi, thanks for the suggestions. I think we've got "support for subfolders" as one the enhancements hanging in the development queue since early days of version 3. I believe that moving and deleting folders , as job containers, that is available since the 1st version. Disabling/enabling all jobs in a container at the folder level was introduced only a couple of weeks ago in version 3.6.1. Your suggestion for multiple item selection using Ctrl and perhaps Shift keys (Shift - for range) like in the Windows Explorer sounds to me like the next logical step :) I'll check if that is already in the enhancements queue, and if not, I'll submit a new request.

Thank you, those features would be very helpful to us since I think that we have a fairly substantial number of jobs that we run on a daily/weekly schedule and it would make organization easier for us.

Since I'm here are there any sizing recommendations for 24x7 scheduler? For example if you have 3000 jobs you should split them into x number of servers or things of that nature? I ask because we pretty much have a job running every minute of the day and sometimes for no apparent reason the 24x7 server just crashes. Now we just started rolling out the new version and maybe that will fix this issue but I always wondered if it was a sizing issue.

Thanks

John

That is a fairly large number of jobs. Because I don't know how they are scheduled or what kind of resources they need, I cannot offer specific sizing recommendations.

I'd like to reiterate general recommendations we typically offer in such cases. Jobs for different business applications should be assigned to different job queues, but don't create a separate queue for each job. A good number of job queues for a system running several hundred or more active jobs should be in 8 to 12 range. All jobs should be set to run detached. The only exception before 3.6 was JAL script jobs using global variables and jobs dynamically creating or modifying other jobs using JAL or VB commands. Global variables issue has been addressed in 3.6.1. Dynamic job creation and modification is going to be addressed in 3.6.3. So basically after 3.6.3 there areabsolutely no reasons to run non-detached jobs. Detached jobs will ensure system stability, jobs won't drain internal scheduler resources. Also please avoid using asynchronous jobs. Use asynchronous jobs only in very special cases such as start and loop-forever jobs running in the background. Replace jobs having every few seconds or every minute schedules with JAL jobs implementing start and loop-forever – this will greatly reduce the stress on the system. When I say loop-forever I mean a programmatic LoopWhile True… End Loop script or similar doing something within the loop then waiting for a few seconds (or minutes) and then spinning again. I've seen system stability issues caused by frequent file checking on networking shared drives. It turned out that network connection hiccups can lead to system stability problems. The new version 3.6 provides new tracing/logging interface that should be a great help with troubleshooting such problems. Another well known cause of crashes is concurrent email sending, I mean several jobs trying to send an email concurrently and loading the same email libraries.

Finally, the answer to your sizing question could be likely found in the Windows Performance Monitor. If you see the CPU average usage above 10%-15% or average I/O throughout picking above normal levels for your system, then you should look into spreading jobs between multiple servers.