How to best run function every x seconds on Google App Engine Python

Question

Using Google App Engine Python 2.7 I want to create job that checks every 10-60s whether heart-beat events where received from all clients. If not an (email) alert is triggered.

The basic alternatives I can imagine are:

• Google Task Queue
• Google Deferred Task Queue
• Cron Jobs (minimum of 1min, but maybe I could just set up a couple of them?)
• (seems not recommended: using sleep)

I found this question but was hoping for a more precise answer: how-can-i-do-the-same-thing-over-and-over-every-1-4-seconds-in-google-app-engine

The reason I want to check that frequently is that an alert needs to be triggered if no update is received for a while.

Answer 1

You could start a cron job that runs every minute. Then in the cron job, do your heartbeat check, sleep for a while, check again, sleep ...