Oh merciful monks, help a brother in his time of need.

I am having to rewrite an application because of third party requirements that I cannot change and on a hosting solution that is being far from helpful. The basic problem is that:

  1. I have to query a database for the least recent record (fifo) and assemble a HTTP request based on it -- BUT I can't send more than one request within a given interval (right now, that's three minutes).
  2. I have to figure out how to address this problem without using server-side triggers (CHRONTAB, etc.) and without being able to create a persistent process (my bet is that the system admin will happily reap this process assuming it was zombie).
  3. I also have to be able to trigger this only through an HTTP request (ie. the *only* access I have to the machine is via FTP and HTTP).
At present, the only thing I can think to do (aside from moving to a _good_ hosting solution) is trigger the script remotely using a minimized webpage on one of the office computers and refresh it every minute. The script it calls would watch for any processes that hadn't finished within the previous three minutes and either shut down or continue based on what it finds. This has its problems because it's always possible for the window to be closed accidentally. I'm sure there are other problems with this 'solution' that I don't see yet.

This is running on a Unix box (a flavour of BSD).

Does anyone have any helpful advice or warnings?

(Sometimes I love my job and, actually, this is one of those times.)

In reply to Scheduling tasks the _hard_ way by Yukio

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