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Taskmatics Scheduler 1.1 Released

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We’ve released version 1.1.0.0 today which contains many performance improvements as well as some new features that were requested by the community. This means that if you download the installer today you’ll be getting the new version, and we’ve updated the Taskmatics Scheduler package on the Nuget repository with a new version. The primary focus of the build was to improve system-wide performance. In cases where there are a significant number of tasks that run at high frequencies we’ve seen some slowness. With our changes we’ve come to see improvements of between 80% to 90% in terms of time. This isn’t limited to the administration UI screens, but also applies to the reports as well.

How to get it

To get the 1.1.0.0 installer, go here!

What’s Inside

The full list of changes in this release are as follows:

  • Added ability to set exclusion dates in the calendar trigger on which the scheduled task will not run.
  • Fixed an intermittent trigger loading error when adding a trigger to an existing scheduled task.
  • Added performance improvements to all reports.
  • Added performance improvements to dashboard loading.
  • Added performance improvements to task dispatching.
  • Added performance improvements to task history search.
  • Database schema changes to help improve overall system performance.
  • Fix for intermittent out of memory exception when querying resource usage.
  • Added filter to the Dashboard screen to allow users to find scheduled tasks that contain the entered term (similar to filter on other listing screens).
  • Added additional error handling and update messaging to the installer process.

Breaking Changes

While it’s always a goal to be fully backwards compatible, this release does contain one breaking change that may require a rebuild of one or more tasks. In the past, each Task instance was identified with a Globally Unique Identifier, or GUID. These identifiers are great at ensuring that you can have billions of tasks that don’t collide with each other but the downside to their guarantee of uniqueness is that they also are not as performant as using sequential integers. As part of the new release, we’ve re-mapped all task instances to use straight 64 bit integers, which gives us the same uniqueness guarantee, but also performs much better under search.

You should update all of your task libraries to reference the Taskmatics.Scheduler.Core 1.1.0.0 Nuget package. If any of your tasks reference TaskBase.Context.TaskInstanceId, you will need to rebuild and re-deploy those tasks as the TaskBase.Context.TaskInstanceId property is now represented as Int64 instead of Guid.

Upgrade Instructions

As of now, we don’t have an upgradeable installer, which means that to upgrade a 1.0.0.0 installation of Taskmatics Scheduler, you should first uninstall the previous version and then simply run the new 1.1.0.0 installer and point to the existing database where Taskmatics was originally set up to use. Note: Uninstalling Taskmatics Scheduler will NEVER remove the data in your database. We suggest following these steps to install the new version on your system:

  1. Stop all coordinator and agent Windows services (done from the Services snap-in).
  2. Backup your existing database. This is precautionary in case anything unexpected happens during the upgrade.
  3. Take note of the following information from your current installation:
    • Your serial number, which is in your email you got when you purchased Taskmatics Scheduler. You can also find it in the license.xml file in the ProgramData\Taskmatics\Scheduler directory.
    • Your current database server, database name and the runtime credentials. These can be found in the ProgramData\Taskmatics\Scheduler\Taskmatics.Scheduler.Coordination.ServiceHost.exe.config file.
    • The runtime users for both the coordinator and agent Windows services, which you can see from the services snap-in.
    • The root filesets path and the root working folders path, which are found in the .config files located in the ProgramData\Taskmatics\Scheduler directory.
  4. Uninstall the existing Taskmatics Scheduler components (done from the Programs and Features screen in Windows)
  5. Run the new Taskmatics.Scheduler installer. You will need to re-enter the information you collected in step 3 to make sure that all the original permissions and mappings are re-used.

Due to the nature of the performance improvements and the significant amount of database changes that are in this update, it is possible, depending on the size of your database, that installation of the new version could take upwards of 30 minutes (if you have millions of task instances in your DB). Making the upgrade path smoother for our users is on the top of our roadmap so we don’t expect this to be the norm going forward.

More to Come

This is just the beginning of the changes that we have in store. Thanks again for using Taskmatics Scheduler, and we hope you enjoy working with the new version even more. Let us know what features you’d like to see in subsequent versions of Taskmatics Scheduler as we’re always looking for ideas from the community.

Where was that download link again?

In case you missed it at the top, to get the 1.1.0.0 installer, go here!