Jobs don’t hold a database connection and they aren’t executed in a transaction, so it’s safe to run them for as long as needed. There’s no limit imposed by Oban on how long a job can run, and it’s entirely up to a few factors in your application:

1. How frequently does the app restart?
2. How will the jobs handle interruption?

If your application restarts frequently during the day due to deployments, and you’re running jobs that take hours, you’ll need to ensure they can restart safely. Some tasks can be broken up and parallelized, while others like video transcoding or archiving may take an hour or more and can’t be broken into smaller segments.

Shutting Down

The shutdown_grace_period config option determines how long Oban will wait for jobs to complete when the application goes to shut down. The default period is 15 seconds, but you can increase it to a larger duration so jobs have longer to shut down. Some applications extend shutdown to an hour to allow long running jobs to complete without restarting and throwing away the previous effort.