How to control task deduplication feature in Google Cloud Tasks

Question

I'm looking at the documentation here:
https://cloud.google.com/tasks/docs/dual-overview
And in quotas here:
https://cloud.google.com/tasks/docs/quotas
I still not sure how I can enable or disable this deduplication feature. I wonder if I can set Task de-duplication window

Answer 1

Task deduplication refers to making sure you don't have duplicate names of tasks.

Per the doc it works like this:

Explicitly specifying a task ID enables task de-duplication. If a task's ID is identical to that of an existing task or a task that was deleted or executed recently then the call will fail with google.rpc.Code.ALREADY_EXISTS. If the task's queue was created using Cloud Tasks, then another task with the same name can't be created for ~1hour after the original task was deleted or executed.
If the task's queue was created using queue.yaml or queue.xml, then another task with the same name can't be created for ~9days after the original task was deleted or executed.

Because there is an extra lookup cost to identify duplicate task names, these tasks.create calls have significantly increased latency.

Answer 2

We had the same problem.

To not spam users, we've been looking for a mechanism that we could use to control the de-duplication feature for certain notification types.

Since they check TASK_ID - we can use it to control de-duplication by adding something unique. For example a timestamp.

TASK_ID is the last part of the task name. Task name looks like this - projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION_ID/queues/QUEUE_ID/tasks/TASK_ID.

If we need to create a task that will be executed once per 10 seconds - we can generate a name like this - projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION_ID/queues/QUEUE_ID/tasks/notification-like-${timestamp}.

Other tasks created within these 10 seconds will be rejected with an error.

JavaScript snippet that generates a task name

/**
 * Round time up to given coefficient.
 * @param {number} coefficient - Coefficient in milliseconds.
 */
const roundTime = (coefficient) => {
    const date = new Date();
    return new Date(Math.ceil(date.getTime() / coefficient) * coefficient).getTime();
};

const coefficient = 1000 * 10; // Trigger once per 10 seconds
const taskId = `notification-like-${roundTime(coefficient)}`;
const taskName = `projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION_ID/queues/QUEUE_ID/tasks/${taskId}`;

console.log(taskName);
// projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION_ID/queues/QUEUE_ID/tasks/notification-like-1643898560000