> 1. Query the database to find all dormant accounts with a balance, which haven't been charged the fee this month.
> 2. Charge each of these accounts a fee
> 3. Setup a cron job to run this every hour
Note that if this job ever runs successfully, but takes more than an hour, you will double-count. Can easily happen if the box running these crons is overloaded. One fix is to automatically halt the job after 55 minutes, another would be to have the middle step be impotent, for each user you're doing the process on, ensure (ideally in a threadsafe manner) that they need the operation to be done still.
> 2. Charge each of these accounts a fee
> 3. Setup a cron job to run this every hour
Note that if this job ever runs successfully, but takes more than an hour, you will double-count. Can easily happen if the box running these crons is overloaded. One fix is to automatically halt the job after 55 minutes, another would be to have the middle step be impotent, for each user you're doing the process on, ensure (ideally in a threadsafe manner) that they need the operation to be done still.