Understanding Timer Jobs

Timer jobs are a great feature of SharePoint. Timer jobs run in the background in a specific Windows service for SharePoint Server and perform various tasks for SharePoint. These include infrastructure tasks for the Timer service, such as clearing the timer job history and recycling the Timer service, and tasks for web applications, such as sending email alerts. The SharePoint 2010 Timer service (SPTimerv4) runs timer jobs. In SharePoint 2010 management of timer jobs is easier than in previous versions. Also SharePoint 2010 adds 21 new timer jobs in addition to the 39 timer jobs present in SharePoint 2007. You can see the list of timer jobs by going to the Central Administration, Monitoring, Review Job Definitions (under the Timer Jobs section), as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2. Timer job definitions

You can see three columns. Title shows the name of the timer job. The second column is Web Application and represents the web application for which the timer job runs. The third column, Schedule Type, shows the type of schedule under which the timer job runs. For some timer jobs this shows as disabled, which means the timer job is disabled and will not run. Click any of the timer jobs and you see the screen shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3. Timer job schedule

This screen provides configuration options for the timer job. You can update the schedule for the timer job or disable the timer job from this screen. You can also make the timer job run explicitly by clicking on the Run Now button.

In addition you can see the status of various running timer jobs at Central Administration, Monitoring, Check Job Status (under the Timer Jobs section), as shown in Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.4. Timer job status

You can also create custom timer jobs. You learn how to create one in Hour 7, “Understanding SharePoint 2010 Server Side Development.”