Automatic lock renewal in QueueProcessorJobBase

[jamie94bc]

We've recently added the ability to renew the lock on the queue entry.

It would be great if we could (optionally) do this automatically in QueueProcessorJobBase for long running processes. The alternative would be to pass the queue entry around everywhere to renew - including in scenarios where you don't care if the code has been triggered from a queue or otherwise.

[niemyjski]

@jamie94bc we made major improvements to lock renewal. Is this still an issue?

[niemyjski]

Thanks for the suggestion! Automatic lock renewal in QueueProcessorJobBase is an interesting idea. It would remove the burden of passing the queue entry around just for renewal purposes.

That said, we'd want to think carefully about the design here. Background renewal introduces some subtle race conditions. For example, if the renewal task silently fails (network issue, lock already expired, etc.), the job may continue processing and then fail to complete or abandon the entry correctly. There's also the question of what happens on cancellation: should the renewal loop stop immediately, or should it renew one last time?

Before we dive in, it would be helpful to understand your design thinking:

• Did you have a specific implementation in mind (e.g., a Timer or Task that periodically calls RenewLockAsync in the background)?
• How would you want to handle renewal failures — should the job be signaled/cancelled, or silently log and continue?
• Would opt-in via a config flag on QueueJobOptions be the right UX, or something more granular?

Happy to explore this for a future milestone if we can nail down the semantics.