[SOLVED] Google App Engine Cron not triggering endpoint at specific times

Issue

We have multiple App Engine Cron entries triggering our App Engine application, but recently we detected a decrease on the number of the processed events handled by one of the endpoints of our application. By looking at the App Engine Cron logs for this specific Cron entry on StackDriver, we found out that, during the days we invesgated (March 11-15), that are missing entries. Most of the missing triggers coincide through the days (12:15, 14:15, 16:15, 18:15, 20:15, 22:15, 00:15).

The screenshot below displays one specific day, and the red lines indicate the missing entries:

There are no requests with HTTP status code different than 200.

This is the configuration of the specific Cron entry (replaced some words with XXX due to business restrictions):

- description: 'Hourly job for XXX'
  url: /schedule/bigquery/XXX
  schedule: every 1 hours from 00:15 to 23:15
  timezone: UTC
  target: XXX
  retry_parameters:
    min_backoff_seconds: 2.5
    max_doublings: 5

Could someone @ GCP side take a look? The task name is 53751dd6a70fb9af38f49993b122b79f.

Solution

it seems like if the request takes longer than an hour, then the next one gets skipped (i.e. cron doesn't launch the next iteration if the current iteration is still running)

maybe do the actual work in a separate task and then the only thing the cron task does is launch this separate task

Answered By - Alex

Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (WPSolving Volunteer)