CRON becoming unresponsive

andrewsb333 · 05-20-2008, 09:48 AM

Hopefully, this is the correct forum to post to...

I'm running SUSE Pro 9.2 on an INTEL server and have an issue that just started to occur. Every once in a while CRON becomes unresponsive and fails to start processes. Nothing has been changed on this server, not the applications running on it or the OS. Once we determine that CRON is unresponsive, we are able to get it running again by killing the daemon and restarting. Any ideas??

MensaWater · 05-20-2008, 11:10 AM

You might look to see if there is any kind of job being run by cron every minute or so that isn't actually completing before the next one starts. I've seen people kill cron (not to mention use up most if not all of the cpu cycles) by doing this.

If so add a line to the script that is being executed by that specific cron job that tests to see if the commands of the job are already waiting and if so exit. (Don't sleep - the next run of cron will do the test again.)