

With DAS giving an activity the instruction to run, that action is passed to CTS, which writes in the log that “DAS told us to run” the activity. If the CurrentScore is below the ThresholdScore, then its DecisionToRun is set to 0, and the activity is left to the next rescoring. If its CurrentScore exceeds the ThresholdScore, and is closer to 1.0, then DAS sets the DecisionToRun for that activity to 1, which is the signal to CTS to run the activity. clock time is now within the time period in which CTS calculated it should next be run. Periodically, it rescores each item in its list, according to various criteria such as whether it is now due to be performed, i.e.

This package is then registered in Centralized Task Scheduling (CTS) as what it terms a DASActivity, and is added to the list of activities which is managed by Duet Activity Scheduler (DAS).ĭAS maintains a scored list of background activities which usually consists of more than seventy items.
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This is how my own app DispatchRider works: it packages up the code to run a command tool in a completion, and hands it over to macOS to deal with. These include one-off, on-demand, and repeated activities. In NSBackgroundActivityScheduler, Apple provides a mechanism by which any app can create an activity which it then hands over to macOS to manage in the background. This article, and its subsequent parts, attempt to explain on the basis of evidence how macOS is running and managing its own concurrent, background, and scheduled tasks.Ĭreating and scheduling background activity But most of the background activities which are run by macOS itself, and closely-fused apps like Safari, use different mechanisms. Some are quite well-known and described in many different sources, such as LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons, which rely on launchd, the master task launcher in macOS.
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But that is one of dozens – typically more than seventy – different background activities which take place, some every few minutes, others only once every now and again.īecause macOS is something of a mongrel, with various flavours of Unix at its heart, and has roots in both the original Mac operating system and NeXT, it has several different mechanisms for running and managing concurrent, background, and scheduled tasks.

The most obvious for many users is the making of Time Machine backups every hour. Every few minutes, or even more often, your Mac runs tasks in the background.
