Hi,

Our trained monkeys have been working non-stop for the last week on a new piece of software for the Toolserver: the jobserver. This software is now ready for testing.

The jobserver is an alternative to cron/phoenix for starting long-running jobs. Instead of having to invoke phoenix regularly in cron, you can instead add your job to the jobserver, and it will be (re)started automatically, even if the server crashes or reboots.

This is still very much pre-alpha, but I've installed the jobserver on willow for testing. You can read more about the jobserver and how to use it on the wiki:

https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Jobserver

Please report any problems on the wiki page. While you should feel free to use and test the jobserver as much as you want, do remember that it may still have serious problems that result in your jobs not running when you expect, or maybe worse.

In the future the jobserver will have additional functionality, including scheduled jobs (to replace cron with a single integrated solution). If you have any other feature requests, you should list them on the wiki.

- river.