Upstart start when system is idle

Question

Is there a way to tell upstart to run a job when system is idle?

If not, what is the next best thing - i.e. how to start it very late in the process, when system is reasonably expected to be idle?

Answer 1

At a first guess you could write a root crontab entry that would check system activity every so often, then initctl emit an event that would start your process. You would probably want to check that the process wasn't already running before launching. You could handle that in either the crontab or the upstart job.

Kind of a hack, but it would probably work.