How to abandon zombie jobs?

Question

I am using Spring Batch in a web application. The jobs are run by a custom TaskExecutor that manages the submitted Runnable s in a queue and executes them one after another. Thus many jobs have the status STARTING or STARTED for a long time.

Now it happend that the server was shutdown while there were still jobs in the queue. After a restart of the server the jobs are still marked as running, but instead they should be abandoned.

How can this be done?

Answer 1

Spring Batch provides no tools out of the box for something like this. The reason for that is that this typically requires a human decision of some kind on what conditions this type of behavior is appropriate.

That being said, in your case, if you are not running in a clustered environment, you could create a component that, on the initialization of the application context, examines the job repository and updates the statuses as required (similar to how you can initialize a datasource on startup).