Hi. I’m looking for the best way to schedule starting/stopping apps at certain times. I have some upload programs (Google Backup & Sync, among others) and limited upstream bandwidth (~2mb). When things are idle, it’s not a problem, but when my wife is trying to watch Netflix (or some other streaming) the upload saturation is a problem. Basically, I want to auto-start things around midnight (in case I forget) and end ~3:00pm.
Suggestions on apps to control other apps? (I already have the bandwidth limit set in GS&B, and that helps some.)
Since I am not a Mac user, I’m not going to have any great input, but at the lowest level, Macs run Unix and Unix has the cron scheduler. If a command line can be used to do the job, then cron can be used to scheduled it. I use cron on my VPS to schedule the Let’s Encrypt key refreshing for the web server.
Yeah it’s a bit odd Automator doesn’t have its own scheduler (AFAIK), but it does the job. At least it creates a separate calendar for all your scheduled scripts, doesn’t mix them up with your other stuff.