[wp-hackers] WP cron and "multi-threading"

[Doug Stewart]

On 10/9/06, Mark Jaquith <mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2006, at 12:14 AM, Robert Deaton wrote:
>
> >> Mark Jaquith wrote:
> >> > You need to expire the "cron_is_running" option, in case your
> >> winning
> >> > race candidate dies before it gets to unset it.
> >
> > No, if it loses the race condition, something else has overwritten it.
> > The other thread that won the race condition will clean it up when its
> > finished.
>
> It'll clean up *IF* it finishes.  What if one of the cron'd actions
> causes a fatal error?  Then you're stuck with "cron_is_running" set
> to a key that'll never be matched again.
>
> Pretend that Tom Hanks is a process.  He claims Helen Hunt by
> marrying her.  Then, his FedEx plane crashes and he's stranded on a
> tropical island with only an inflatable ball as a companion.  Helen
> Hunt is stuck, because she can't confirm that Hanks has died or
> otherwise *explicitly* relinquished his claim on her as his spouse.
> Should she wait forever?  Nah.  She waits a few years and Hanks is
> declared legally dead, and she remarries.
>
> Sort of like that. :-)
>
>

Now that, right there, is funny.

As long as you don't try to get all "current entertainment events" on
us and claim the process is some dude named "Desmond" on a race around
the world who mysteriously disappears in a magnetic anomaly who spends
several years typing out a series of lottery numbers on an ancient
green screen, overseen by a former CIA agent whom Desmond pursues and
finds is secretly reconstructing his boat in order to escape from the
island and accidentally kills and then triggers a second anomaly which
causes a planeload of very attractive people to break up over the
island and...

Okay, I'll stop now.

-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/