Web application running a service when EXE not allowed

[Steven Nagy]

Hi all,

I have a problem where I am developing a site for a client that needs
to perform a certain analysis against the database every hour, on the
hour. The problem is that the hosting company will only allow a
standard ASP.NET web app to be run on their server; no EXE's can be
run. So I am not sure how I would implement functionality to run the
required service.

You see, its theoretically possible that no one would use the site on a
particular day, but during that day there still needs to be something
running to analyse the database every hour.

I guess the problem is that I am thinking of web apps as being "user
driven". Ie, a page only executes because it has been requested by a
browser. I have ideas that might be too crazy to even attempt. For
example, creating a timer and putting it in some sort of application
state (I assume something like this exists) and the timer tick event
does my processing. I could then write an admin page that could check
the status of the timer, if its started or not, thus being able to turn
my "service" on and off. I could create the timer on application_start
in Global.asa and put the object somewhere I can retrieve later from an
admin login.

Is my idea crazy? Whats the best way to approach this specific problem?


Many thanks,
Steven

 

[Greg Young]

You could quite easily handle this by creating a background thread in the
application (but it would also need to be smart enough to only run a single
instance even if there are many worker processes, assuming you are running
on a single machine a mutex could easily handle this case).

Cheers,

Greg Young

 

[David Hogue]

You might run into some problems with running a timer from ASP.NET. For
one I think the application is unloaded from memory if it doesn't get
any requests for a while. Also, the hosting provider may restart IIS
occasionally. I know some places that restart IIS every night and I
think by default it restarts itself every 27 hours or so.

Is the database MS SQL Server? If so it has some tools to schedule
tasks. Though I don't know if the host would give you access to these.

Another thought is have a scheduled task/cron job on another connection
hit a maintenance.aspx page every hour. Or even use a web service.

 

[Steven Nagy]

Yeah I had considered using a web service, and then running the job on
a different server, but its only a small site for a small client and
its only the one host, shared server.
I could host it at my home, but I'm not looking for an ongoing support
contract, plus the legal issues if it goes down, etc.

So I will try the seperate thread suggestion. Otherwise I'll tell the
company to consider another host.

Cheers guys.