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Simple question, I want to set 24 or 12 hours timeout in Node.js to periodically (once or twice a day) check some db data and clean suspicious garbage, if any.
Is there any possible problems or performance issues, caused by setting huge timeout, that i need to be aware of? I don't mind if it's not exact 12-24hr in ms, and don't mind loosing this timeout on server crash, as I will run same garbage collector on server startup anyway.
Conclusion:
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No significant effect at all, setTimeout runs in an event loop, it doesn't block or harm execution.
Browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox store the delay as a 32-bit signed integer internally. This causes an integer overflow when using delays larger than 2,147,483,647 ms (about 24.8 days), resulting in the timeout being executed immediately.
Explanation: setTimeout() is non-blocking which means it will run when the statements outside of it have executed and then after one second it will execute.
The setTimeout function is used to call a function after the specified number of milliseconds. The delay of the called function begins after the remaining statements in the script have finished executing. The setTimeout function is found in the Timers module of Node. js.
I've had success using the package cron. It's simple to use and is generally compatible with a CronTab. I've had a job that runs once a month and this has worked consistently since last year, so I can attest to it.
That being said, this package ultimately does just use setTimeout internally so there's no real issue with you doing that. If your timeout number is too large (larger than the maximum JavaScript integer) there may be a problem, but 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 is significantly smaller than that.
Obviously if your system goes down or the script crashes for some other reason the timeout won't work.
You could also just use crontab directly if it's available (or Windows task scheduling).
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Personally, I would use a cron job to do this sort of thing (in Unix/Linux), or a "scheduled task" in Windows. In any case, the work would be done entirely on the server, by the server ... and thus, there's really no reason to have a JavaScript app (on "some other" computer) to be involved with it.
More generally: "no, don't tell someone to 'go to sleep for 12 hours,' somehow trusting that this means s/he will wake up in time." Instead, use an alarm-clock. Calculate the absolute-time at which the activity should [next] occur, then see to it that the activity does occur "not-sooner." Arrange for the computer that actually needs to do the work, to do the work at the appropriate time, using whatever scheduling facilities are available on that computer.
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