ftp protocol problem

[David Barr]

We’re having a problem with an inbound FTP thread.  First of all, there was a bug which we are working around in QDX 5.2.1P2.  If there are no files in the directory that we are downloading from, some FTP servers give a response that puts the thread in an error state.  To work around this problem, we put a file called “DUMMY” on the ftp server, and we have our Directory Parse TPS filter this out of the list of files so that we never download it, so we never see an empty directory.

We have the thread set up to use advanced scheduling with a schedule of “* 00,30 5-12 * * 1-5” so that we are checking for files at half-hour intervals from 5am until 12pm from Monday through Friday.  The problem is that when it comes time to read the files, the thread retries extremely rapidly.  It keeps trying with almost no pause from 9:00:00 (for example) until 9:00:59.  I’ve seen it scanning the FTP server 36 times in the same minute.

This seems really inefficient to me.  We just want to check for the file once every thirty minutes.  What is the correct way to set this up?  I don’t know if our kludge to deal with the empty directory problem is causing this second problem.

Thanks,

David

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[Bill Bertera]

I ran into this also. You have to put 0, or another value, in the seconds field, otherwise it tries every available second – *.

[David Barr]

I thought about trying that. My concern was that if I do that, it might not run at all.  If I only specify one second in the seconds field, is it guaranteed to run at least once?

[Bill Bertera]

It always has for me. the reason you see it “only” 36 times a minute, is that it doesn’t kick off when its already running. So it kicks off at .00, runs for 2 seconds, and kicks off again at .03, etc… So, as long as it’s still not running from the prior 30 minutes instance, it will always run at 0 seconds.

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