Different ways to schedule tasks in Python

Gaurav Kumar
8 min readDec 8, 2023

6 Ways to Schedule and Execute Jobs

Scheduling tasks is a vital aspect of many modern applications, whether it involves regularly checking APIs or databases, monitoring the health of systems, or implementing auto-scaling functionalities. Even auto-scaling systems like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos rely on periodic checks to ensure the smooth operation of deployed applications.

To maintain a separation between task execution and core business logic, independent execution queues such as Redis queues are often employed. In this article, we’ll explore various methods for scheduling and running Python jobs through simple tutorials. These methods include basic loops, threaded loops for concurrency, the Schedule Library for task scheduling, Python Crontab for time-based scheduling, and RQ Scheduler for leveraging decoupled queues.

Method 1: The Simple Loop

Setting up a job using simple loops is a direct and simple method. It entails running a continuous while loop that intermittently triggers a specific function. While there are more efficient approaches available, this straightforward method gets the job done.

To introduce time intervals between function calls, you can utilize the sleep function from Python’s built-in time module. Despite…

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