Quartz.Net Thread Pools

Question

I have quartz.net set up to run several scheduled jobs and several polling jobs. The polling jobs can consist of running code that can take 10 minutes. These jobs are queued from user actions (and so there could be a queue of x user actions). I have scheuled jobs that HAVE to run at that time. However, the threads could all be used up by the long running polling jobs. Is there any way to have a designated thread for the scheduled tasks that will never be used by the polling jobs?

I am aware of the thread priority but this will not guarentee the scheduled job will run if the other threads are already in use.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You're right. If the threads are all running jobs, your scheduled jobs won't run at the scheduled time.

AFAIK there is no way to reserve a thread for certain jobs. If you want to stick to quartz to run the schduled job, you could set up a separate Quartz instance to run the scheduled jobs and then set the thread pool size to a number that would guarantee that there will always be some thread available to run.

Answer 2

Another suggestion, when the job fires, spin another thread off to do the work, so you can return the job thread to the Quartz pool.

Use a bounded thread pool for the worker threads, so you don't get too many worker threads running at the same time.

See, java.util.concurrent for the Executor and ThreadPool classes. It's a more complicated solution, but may scale better.