A few months ago, zap2it‘s renewal survey included a set of questions that were not questions, but rather pleas that people move their database updates to a non-standard time. The default install of MythTV has a hard-coded time in the middle of the night to contact the zap2it servers for TV listing updates. Unfortunately, this means zap2it’s servers were (are?) getting crushed on the hour, across 4 time-zones, in the middle of the night.
To solve this little problem in MythTV, I turned off the built-in “mythfilldatabase” execution, and moved to doing it via crontab. zap2it said they had virtually no load during the day-time, so I moved the update to a little after noon, sticking the following in /etc/cron.d/mythtv-backend:
09 12 * * * mythtv mythfilldatabase –quiet
It dawned on me today while messing around with the “at” scheduler that I could actually randomize when during the day the mythfilldatabase runs. If you wanted to run the job anywhere in a 12 hour (720 minute) period after 9am, you could do it this way:
0 9 * * * mythtv echo “mythfilldatabase –quiet” | at + $(( RANDOM % 720 )) minutes
(My bash manpage says the low-order bits of $RANDOM are as random as the high-order bits, so this is “safe”. If you don’t trust your version of bash, you could use $(( 720 * RANDOM / 32767 )) instead. IANAMG*, YMMV, OMGPONIES.)
*I Am Not A Math Geek
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.