Scheduling periodic reactive tasks in Spring using cron?

Question

Normally I would do something like this to schedule a job to be periodically executed in Spring with cron in a given timezone:

@Scheduled(cron = "0 0 10 * * *", zone = "Europe/Stockholm")
public void scheduleStuff() {
    // Do stuff
}

This is will block the thread calling scheduleStuff until the job is completed. However in this case the "stuff" I want to do is all implemented using Springs' non-blocking building blocks of project reactor (i.e. Mono, Flux etc).

E.g. let's say that I want to trigger this function periodically:

Flux<Void> stuff() {
    return ..
}

I can of course simply call stuff().subscribe() (or even stuff().block()) but this will block the thread. Is there a better way to achieve the same things as @Scheduled(cron = "0 0 10 * * *", zone = "Europe/Stockholm") for non-blocking code?

I'm using Spring Boot 2.1.

Answer 1

Actualy, subscribe() doesn't block your thread. You could call stuff().subscribeOn(Schedulers.parallel()).subscribe() or other scheduler to be sure that execution will be done in a separate thread, if you really need it.