Generally the Cron plugin will run if there's still execution time for
1 second since starting the Action processing. If you want to change
this (such as disabling, 0 seconds, or maybe running bigger chunks,
for like 4 seconds) you can do this, where 'n' is time in seconds.
addPlugin('Cron', array('secs_per_action', n));
Add 'rel_to_pageload'=>false to the array if you want to run the queue
for a certain amount of seconds _despite_ maybe already having run that
long in the previous parts of Action processing.
Perhaps you want to run the cron script remotely, using a machine capable
of background processing (or locally, to avoid running daemon processes),
simply do an HTTP GET request to the route /main/cron of your GNU social.
Setting secs_per_action to 0 in the plugin config will imply that you run
all your queue handling by calling /main/cron (which runs as long as it can).
/main/cron will output "0" if it has finished processing, "1" if it should
be called again to complete processing (because it ran out of time due to
PHP's max_execution_time INI setting).
The Cron plugin also runs events as close to hourly, daily and weekly
as you get, based on the opportunistic method of running whenever a user
visits the site. This means of course that the cron events should be as
fast as possible, not only to avoid delaying page load for users but
also to minimize the risk of running into PHP's max_execution_time. One
suggestion is to only use the events to add new queue items for later processing.
These events are called CronHourly, CronDaily, CronWeekly - however there
is no guarantee that all events will execute, so some kind of failsafe,
transaction-ish method must be implemented in the future.
To make the StatusNet::addPlugin() accept only arrays,
the lib/default.php had to be changed because all plugins
had 'null' as default value instead of an array.
Among other things (such as permanent subscriptions), Pubsubhubbub 0.4
removed the "sync" verification method. This means that any incoming
PuSH subscription requests that follow the 0.4 spec won't really
_require_that we handle it as a background process, but if we were to
try direct verification of the subscription - and fail - there's no way
we could pick up the ball again. So _essentially_ we require background
processing with retries.
This means we must implement something like the "poorman cron" or
similar, so background processing can be handled
on-demand/on-site-visit. This is how Friendica, Drupal etc. handles it
and is necessary for environments where we can't run separate queue
daemons.
When the poorman-cron-ish thing is implemented, auto-renewal will work
for all users.
PuSH 0.4 spec:
https://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/git/pubsubhubbub-core-0.4.html
More on PuSH 0.4 release (incl. breaking changes):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/pubsubhubbub/7RPlYMds4RI/2mIHQTdV3aoJ
This is more of a proof of concept and will likely not stay in exactly
this form. We should reasonably deliver the entire notice upon webfinger
querying.
