Question

I have cron setup in appengine project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<cronentries>
    <cron>
        <url>/cron/someurl</url>
        <description>cron</description>
        <schedule>every monday 8:00</schedule>
        <timezone>Asia/Singapore</timezone>
    </cron>
</cronentries>

I am getting the error:

com.google.apphosting.api.DeadlineExceededException: This request (40811df3b6350a70) started at 2012/11/26 00:00:00.404 UTC and was still executing at 2012/11/26 00:09:59.917 UTC.

It’s a 1-minute limit to run the task? I though cron doesn’t have that limit. How to avoid the error in cron entry?

Thanks.

Answer 1

An HTTP request invoked by cron can run for up to 10 minutes, as per the documentation. If you notice the exception log closely in the HH:MM:SS value, you will find that a total of 10 minutes have passed since the job was started.

You might want to look at your code to see why it is taking that long. In case you have requirements that make your tasks run longer than 10 minutes, I suggest that you look at trapping the exception and then inserting another request to run a job with some request parameter that tells the job to start from where it left off last time.

Alternately, you could also look at Backends.