Django schedule task on timeout

I have a time-out set on an entity in my database, and a开发者_如何学C state (active/finished) assigned to it. What I want is to change that entity's state to finished when that time-out expires. I was thinking of using celery to create a scheduled task with that associated time-out on object creation, which in turn would trigger a django signal to notify that the object has 'expired' and after that I would set the value to finished in the signal handler. Still, this seems like a bit of an overhead, and I am thinking that there must be a more straight-forward way to do this.

Thank you in advance.

Not necessarily light-weight, but when I was faced with this problem I had two solutions.

For the first, I wrote a Django manager that would create a queryset of "to be expired" objects and then delete them. To make this lighter, I kept the "to be expired on event" objects in their own table with a one-to-one relationship to the actual objects, and deleted these events they're done to keep that table small. The relationship between the "to be expired" object and the object being marked "expired" only causes a database hit on the second table when you dereference the ForeignKey field, so it's fairly lightweight. I would then call that management call every 5 minutes with cron (the schedule manager for Unix, if you're not familiar with Unix). This was fine for an every-hour-or-so timeout.

For more close-to-the-second timeouts, my solution was to run a separate server that receives, via REST calls from the Django app, notices of timeouts. It keeps a sorted list of when timeouts were to occur, and then calls the aforementioned management call. It's basically a scheduler of its own with scheduled events being fed to it by the Django process. To make it cheap, I wrote it using Node.js.

Both of these worked. The cron job is far easier.

If the state is always active until it's expired and always finished afterwards, it would be simpler to just have a "finished" datetime field. Everything with a datetime in the past would be finished and everything in the future would be active. Unless there is some complexity going on that is not mentioned in your question, that should provide the functionality you want without any scheduling at all.

Example:

class TaskManager(models.Manager):
    def finished(self):
        return self.filter(finish__lte=datetime.datetime.now())

    def active(self):
        return self.filter(finish__gt=datetime.datetime.now())

class Task(models.Model):
    finish = models.DateTimeField()

    def is_finished(self):
        return self.finish <= datetime.datetime.now()