[development] estimating execution time left and hook_cron

[Ken Winters]

Nitin,

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.ini-get.php will let you get the  
php setting, though there may be better ways of handling this.

The cron semaphore is just to make sure more than one instance of the  
cron isn't running at once (a signaling system).

- Ken Winters


On Sep 18, 2009, at 1:16 PM, nitin gupta wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am maintaining the module feedapi imagegrabber, which pulls the  
> images from the original url of the feed items (just like google  
> reader). It is implemented on the top of feedapi and hence  
> implements the feedapi_after_refresh() hook, which is basically  
> fired by the feedapi after it has refreshed the feed.
>
> Now, as my module download images from an external website, I can  
> never be sure about the time it will take to complete the job of  
> downloading images for all the feed items. Therefore, sometimes I  
> get a 'fatal execution time exceeded error'. How can I know how much  
> execution time is left, so that I can return on time by saving the  
> rest of the work as a cron job?
>
> I have gone through the source code of FeedAPI which implements  
> hook_cron(). It uses a variable called 'cron_semaphore', which I am  
> guessing is some way to share execution time but am unable to get  
> how. I will really appreciate if someone can explain the above to me  
> or provide some tutorial links on writing a good hook_cron  
> implementation.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Nitin Kumar Gupta
> http://publicmind.in/blog/

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