@hubertlepicki You can manage long-running cron jobs without overlap with a small tweak to the job’s unique settings. Here’s a complete example of a cron that is scheduled to run every minute but purposefully takes 65s to complete:

defmodule SlowCron do
  use Oban.Worker,
    max_attempts: 1,
    unique: [period: 300, states: ~w(available executing)a]

  def perform(job) do
    IO.puts("Started #{job.id}, inserted at #{job.inserted_at}")

    Process.sleep(:timer.seconds(65))

    IO.puts("Finished #{job.id}")

    :ok
  end
end

Oban.Test.Repo.start_link()

Oban.start_link(
  repo: Oban.Test.Repo,
  queues: [default: 10],
  plugins: [{Oban.Plugins.Cron, crontab: [{"* * * * *", SlowCron}]}]
)

The console output shows that the job ids are sequential but skip over the overlapping minute:

Started 16144, inserted at 2022-11-21 16:01:00.409060Z
Finished 16144
Started 16145, inserted at 2022-11-21 16:03:00.429351Z
Finished 16145
Started 16146, inserted at 2022-11-21 16:05:00.447115Z

The important part is extending the unique period while overriding the unique states so they don’t include completed jobs. This is safe because cron will only run on a single node in your cluster (the leader, according to Oban.Peer.leader?/0) regardless of the unique settings.

that was 50% why I asked it. It’s not obvious from the documentation. I could have experimented with unique: options but that’d be wasting some precious time I could spend playing with my kiddo. So I asked on Elixirforum and tagged @sorentwo . Hope that’s fine. Now it’s documented for everyone who can google.

@sorentwo that works thank you so much!

@dimitarvp we’re paying @sorentwo precisely not to have deal with all that xD.