Using the timer, how?

[Ralph Slooten]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but please bear with me ;-)

I have over the last week put together bits and pieces to create my own bot, which works rather great if I may say so. One thing I cannot work out is the timer. What I want to do is have a timer which simply outputs the total users to a separate log file for web stats. I just cannot get it to work. In my bot.pl, I have at the top:

$ALARM_TIME = "1m";

and all the way down (not in any other subfunction, I have used the example from the docs:

sub hub_timer()
{
     odch::data_to_all("<$botname> Hub timer test.|");
}

If I understand this correctly, it should, every minute send a message to all (main chat) of "Hub timer test", but I get nothing, and then suddenly, some 8 minutes after reloading the script I get the message.... but this isn't every 8 minutes... really wierd.

Am I missing something here? Do I have to add an &sub_timer(); somewhere?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Ralph

[AzaToth]

the alarm is 900 seconds

[Ralph Slooten]

Is there a way to set this to a lower/higher time, and if so, how exactly?

[AzaToth]

You can edit main.h

#define ALARM_TIME         900             /* Seconds between alarm calls */

[Robin Hill]

I'd watch out changing this as there's a lot of processing done in the hub at each alarm call, so reducing this time could produce other problems.

[Robin Hill]

You can use perl's alarm function as so (the scripts are separate processes so the alarm signal won't interfere with the hubs alarm):

$TimerInterval = 60;
$SIG{ALRM} = \&ScriptTimer;
alarm($TimerInterval);

sub ScriptTimer {
# Code goes in here

alarm($TimerInterval);
}

[Ralph Slooten]

Thanks, works like a charm with the perl timer ;-)

Many thanks
Ralph