6. Timer Jobs
Timer jobs work at the heart of a SharePoint
farm. Each SharePoint server (web-front-end or application server)
hosts a SharePoint timer service, which is a Windows service. This
service is responsible for running SharePoint jobs—designated units of
functionality to execute a designated time and perhaps recurring.
SharePoint relies on a vast number of timer
service jobs to maintain operation of the farm. The following steps
demonstrate how to view the available timer job definitions in the farm:
- Open Central Administration.
- Click the Monitoring heading link.
- Click the Review Job Definitions link, under the Timer Jobs heading.
- SharePoint displays a page like that in Figure 9.
Timer job definitions are SharePoint
Foundation Timer services, or associated with other SharePoint
services, such as the Access or Excel services.
- Click the View drop-down box in the top right to list timer services by web application, services, or list all jobs.
- Click the name of any of the timer job definitions to see the details of the job.
Administrators may change the schedule of
most jobs. They may also disable and enable jobs. SharePoint allows
creation of new jobs only via code and feature deployment, so seek a
developer if you need a special job created. Some of the functional
features of SharePoint create timer jobs to perform their tasks; for
example, Content Deployment creates a new timer job to deploy content
to another farm.
- Navigate back to the Monitoring page of Central Administration.
- Click the Check Job Status link.
- SharePoint shows you a page of upcoming scheduled jobs, running
jobs, and a history of jobs executed, with their completion status (Figure 10).
7. The Developer Dashboard
Microsoft introduced this feature with SharePoint
2010, and it provides performance and tracing information within
SharePoint rendered pages. Developers (and administrators) may diagnose
slow-rendering pages using the Developer Dashboard. Figure 11 is an example of the Developer Dashboard output.
The following STSADM command demonstrates enabling the Developer Dashboard:
STSADM-o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv ondemand on
The following command disables it:
STSADM-o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv ondemand off