This means that if an agent is doing something that takes a few seconds, it holds up all the other agents. In the real world this could mean that email doesn't get sent until a search engine is finished doing an overnight crawl. Threads are better than agents for server apps, they truly run concurrently, they wait for nothing. There's a new version of system.shutdown.shutdownscript in the root updates process. It calls scheduler.shutdown as Frontier exits.
Pointers See the docs page for the original scheduler .
Hmm, I like the looks of this. I have a strong dislike of agents, and saw various problems with trying to manage the queue thread via an agent. The new thread manager built into the queue manager looks like it could solve the problem. It would be nice if the thread scripts could accept parameters, but I guess that can be worked around. I like it.