OpenPBS vs Webcron

OpenPBS schedules jobs and manages workloads in high-performance computing environments, including clusters, clouds, and supercomputers. Its policy-driven scheduling balances job turnaround time and system utilization while selecting job placements. The system is designed for millions of cores and has been tested beyond 50,000 nodes. A plugin framework provides administration visibility and supports customized extensions. Health checks monitor faults and can mitigate them automatically; the fail-over architecture is designed to avoid a single point of failure and keep jobs running through failures. OpenPBS is self-hosted and free under the AGPL 3.0 open-source license, while PBS Pro is also dual licensed commercially. Public-sector organizations such as academic and research facilities generally choose the open-source license. Community help comes through a volunteer forum, without a guarantee of answers or bug fixes. OpenPBS is integrated into the OpenHPC software stack. The installation guide states that SELinux is not supported, and critical and high security fixes are delivered in the next major release.

Webcron is a cloud service for scheduling web-accessible scripts and monitoring servers, websites, and routers. Jobs can run once or on a schedule as often as every minute, with timeouts up to one hour. Users can choose notifications for successful or failed jobs. Monitoring checks whether targets can be reached from more than one location, using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, or ping at intervals from 1 to 60 minutes. Monitors can compare page content, look for a specified string, and add custom request headers.

The API communicates directly with the Webcron engine, and its documented methods cover cron jobs and monitors. A PHP class is available for API connections and is stated to support PHP 5.0 and later. The maker lists monitoring stations in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Ireland, Brazil, Germany, France, South Korea, and Australia. Webcron has no free plan and offers a 14-day trial; monitoring can be tried free for one week or until credits are used up. Listed per-launch prices include free for a 180-second timeout, €0.01, paid once for 600 seconds, €0.13, paid once for 1800 seconds, and €0.25, paid once for 3600 seconds. Email alerts cost €0.01 and SMS alerts cost €0.15.