Hi, On Mon, 5 May 2014 08:05:08 -0500 Maciej Puzio <mx34567@gmail.com> wrote:
I have been testing the issue for a week. Daily timers are fired between 0:00 and 0:01 without exception - all timers at the same time, all machines at the same time, every day at the same time. The largest variation I have seen was 30 seconds. So yes, there is definitely an issue with AccuracySec=12h not being honored.
AFAIU systemd is supposed to start timers "randomly" in the time interval [1d, 1d + 12h]; different timers are started in parallel. Are you arguing that the starting time is not "random" enough?
However, whether timer accuracy is 30 seconds or 12 hours, this makes little difference to me, as both are unacceptable without the possibility to customize timer elapse time. I have reverted all my Arch machines to previous cron-based config and intend to keep it this way. Perhaps it is not "cool", but at least it works.
You misunderstood the point here. Systemd timers (at least in the current form) are _not_ cron replacement. However, they are adequate for daily maintainance jobs that are shipped with packages. If you had custom, carefully scheduled cron jobs, you should continue using cronie. What I don't understand is why do you care when man-db/updatedb runs?
An example of such a solution would be hourly/daily/monthly/weekly timers that execute scripts from relevant /etc/cron.* directories. That would allow for removal of cronie while sidestepping timer elapse problems that we are discussing here. It would also have a benefit of handling all cron tasks in addition to logrotate/updatedb/man-db/shadow.
The scripts mainly set up the environment which is now done by systemd. You issue is with scheduling, and it will _not_ go away because scripts are still executed by systemd (as opposed to cronie). Cheers, -- Leonid Isaev GPG fingerprints: DA92 034D B4A8 EC51 7EA6 20DF 9291 EE8A 043C B8C4 C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D