Microservices, tasks and jobs
Last updated
Last updated
There are three units of "work" in Archivematica, which you can see in the Archivematica dashboard:
The top level unit is the microservice, for example Create SIP from Transfer.
Each microservice runs a number of jobs. Each job is doing a different action – for example, Check transfer directory for objects or Load options to create SIPs.
Each job may spawn one or more tasks, which are the Python scripts that run under the hood. You can see the tasks by clicking the gear icon. Often tasks run on a per-file basis: if there are 100 files in a transfer package and you need to perform an action on each file, there would be 100 tasks.
Microservices contain jobs, jobs spawn tasks:
Sometimes actions get stuck and need to be restarted; the only way I know how to do this is to restart the Archivematica containers (more on that below). Doing this may cause weird things to happen:
When the job is re-run, it gets scheduled twice, which might cause interesting things to happen downstream. Here's an example: this ingest had failed at the Prepare AIP step, I restarted the containers, and every job in and after Prepare AIP was run twice:
Not all tasks tolerate being run twice, e.g. they try to create a directory and fail if the directory already exists (from a previous run of the task).
