Is the Task Scheduler in Windows XP reliable enough to be trusted with important tasks?

I ask because the software my company is about to start using requires a single (windows) workstation to run a small automation program each night to increment several fields in the database. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this is terrible design, but there's not much I can do about it for the moment (at least until I have time to figure out what exactly it's doing and replace it with a cron-able perl script).

In the past, my only dealings with the Windows task scheduler wizard were for miscellaneous home tasks several years ago. I recall some tasks not getting executed at all, or some others only running intermittently.

Assuming the task is configured correctly, can I trust the Windows XP task scheduler to ALWAYS run this job or is it unreliable?

Solution 1:

We have several "critical" systems where our vendors have chosen to depend on Windows Task Manager. The only problems I have ever seen would be; run times missed when the machine is off (it's not a job queue), tasks that fail simply because they were setup improperly, the executable or script itself failing every time task manager calls it and, the biggest problem of all has been, the user account set for the particular task getting locked out for any number of reasons.

To prevent the account lockout problem, I would recommend either creating a special account for the task or a little trick I have found, if the task does not need network access, you can schedule it to run as System with a blank password.

Finally, we monitor either automatically or manually all critical tasks. Just in case.

You mentioned this task was for a database. Is that database a Microsoft SQL Server? If so, you will want to look into using SQL Server Agent.

Solution 2:

I'd say the scheduler itself is reliable as the OS it is running on.

Mostly, I've dealt with the task scheduler on Server 2000 and 2003 rather than XP but I can't recall a scheduled task failure for a task that that was related to an actual scheduler malfunction.

If that's the recommended configuration for this software, I'm sure the vendor must have confidence in the XP task Scheduler.