randomize minute, when just "every :hour" is given

[philister]

Hi,
if you have several task that should run "every :hour", it could be a good idea to randomize the exact minute each task is running. Of course that could be the same for "every :day" and others.
Is there a feature like that yet? Good idea? If so, I can imagine to implement it.

Thanks and Greetings, Phil

[Tim Uckun]

I do think this would be a valuable feature.  If you have a server with 20 or 30 apps running on it and they all have cron jobs that fire once a day or once an hour or every five minutes then you end up slamming the server all at once.

So for any cron period it would be useful to specify a sub element as being random. For example if you are firing every five minutes it might be nice to say "fire at a random second" which might stagger the load a bit on the server.  Having said that I could see somebody wanting to put some constraints on it like "fire once an hour with a random minute but no later than five minutes after the hour".

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[Philipp Albig]

This is the first shot. Feedback welcome.
https://github.com/philister/whenever

If you use the Symbol-Shortcut (:hour or :day at the moment) and leave the at-argument blank, the exact time of execution will be randomized

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[awe...@mdsol.com]

Cool! Found this after posting my own randomization PR at https://github.com/javan/whenever/pull/615, that does the randomization at the seconds level (since apparently "top of the minute" is a thing). Your approach is compatible, though, maybe we could do both. Yours may work better for jobs like "every(:hour)," mine for more-frequently-running jobs or jobs with more specific schedules (since mine supports "every(:day, at: '3:00 am').and_about(20.minutes)").