Periodic — Periodic watcher

class Periodic(offset, interval, loop, callback[, data=None, priority=0])
Parameters:

Periodic watchers are also timers of a kind, but they are very versatile (and unfortunately a bit complex).

Unlike Timer, Periodic watchers are not based on real time (or relative time, the physical time that passes) but on wall clock time (absolute time, the thing you can read on your calendar or clock). The difference is that wall clock time can run faster or slower than real time, and time jumps are not uncommon (e.g. when you adjust your wrist-watch).

You can tell a Periodic watcher to trigger after some specific point in time: for example, if you tell a Periodic watcher to trigger “in 10 seconds” (by specifying e.g. Loop.now() + 10.0, that is, an absolute time not a delay) and then reset your system clock to January of the previous year, then it will take a year or more to trigger the event (unlike a Timer, which would still trigger roughly 10 seconds after starting it, as it uses a relative timeout).

As with timers, the callback is guaranteed to be invoked only when the point in time where it is supposed to trigger has passed. If multiple timers become ready during the same loop iteration then the ones with earlier time-out values are invoked before ones with later time-out values (but this is no longer true when a callback calls Loop.start() recursively).

See also

ev_periodic - to cron or not to cron?

set(offset, interval)
Parameters:

Reconfigures the watcher.

reset()

Simply stops and restarts the watcher. This is only useful when you changed some attributes.

offset

The current offset value (see Modes of operation). Can be modified any time, but changes only take effect when the periodic timer fires or reset() is called.

interval

The current interval value (see Modes of operation). Can be modified any time, but changes only take effect when the periodic timer fires or reset() is called.

at

Read only

When active, this is the absolute time that the watcher is supposed to trigger next. This is not the same as the offset argument to set() or __init__(), but indeed works even in interval mode.

Modes of operation

Absolute timer - interval = 0

In this mode the watcher triggers an event after the wall clock time offset has passed. It will not repeat and will not adjust when a time jump occurs, that is, if it is to be run at January 1st 2014 then it will be stopped and invoked when the system clock reaches or surpasses this point in time.

Example, trigger an event on January 1st 2014 00:00:00 UTC:

Periodic(1388534400.0, 0.0, loop, callback)

In this mode:

  • offset is an absolute time expressed in seconds since the epoch.
  • interval must be 0.

Repeating interval timer - interval > 0

This can be used to create timers that do not drift with respect to the system clock, for example, here is a Periodic that triggers each hour, on the hour (with respect to UTC):

Periodic(0.0, 3600.0, loop, callback)

This doesn’t mean there will always be 3600 seconds in between triggers, but only that the callback will be called when the system time shows a full hour (UTC), or more correctly, when the system time is evenly divisible by 3600.

In this mode:

  • offset is merely an offset into the interval periods and must be 0.0 or something between 0.0 and interval.
  • interval must be positive, and for numerical stability, should be higher than 1/8192 (which is around 120 microseconds).

Note also that there is an upper limit to how often a timer can fire (CPU speed for example), so if interval is very small then timing stability will of course deteriorate.