I am currently having difficulties with vixie-cron (vixie-cron-4.1-44.EL4) running on CentOS 4.3
Here is the situation, I set up a bunch of cronjobs (100 or so in a normal user's crontab) that execute PERL scripts. There is about 20 jobs that run every minute (100 in a 5 minute period).

Now here is the problem, I keep seeing a 'System error' message in the cron log files and the PERL script fails to execute.
If I run these scripts manually, I have no problems and the load on the server is ok. There is no pattern - that I can see - to when I get these errors.
I was able to upgrade the Kernel and vixie-cron to latest available version from the distro, but I still get these errors.

If anyone has a suggestion to give, I am all ears.

Check /var/log/messages and /var/log/audit/audit.log (if it exists, and you are using SELinux).

There is nothing in /var/log/messages and SELinux is disabled.
I am at a lost...

Have you edited the crontab file manually, or are you using the 'crontab -e' command? The crontab command checks syntax; perhaps there's an error in the file?

Yes, I use the 'crontab -e' command to edit it.

The 'System error' message in the cron log files appears at (from what I can tell) at random times. It is never at the same time with the same scripts, it changes... different times, different scritps.

Perhaps the error is being reported by one of the scripts (or something they in turn run), and not by cron itself. Are there any root emails from cron? If so, that's the likely cause.

I did think about that possibility. My scripts interface with MySQL and other daemons using PERL modules. If that is the case, then the daemons are throwing bad exceptions that cause the whole script to die.
I did look at the various configurations files and made some changes which seems to have help (I think), but I still get some 'System Errors'.

However, I now believe that these 'System Errors' may be caused by a lack of system resources (i.e. CPU availability).
Is it possible that CRON (or another Linux process) comes along and decides to kill my script if there is not enough available CPU available?


P.S. Sorry for the long delay.

If you have resource limits set (e.g. ulimit), then that can certainly stop your program. If the system runs out of memory, the OOM (Out Of Memory killer in the kernel) could kill the process to save the system. If that happened, there will be a message in the system log (/var/log/messages).

I don't think memory is the case, I see no errors in /var/log/messages and if OOM does kill a process, it tells you which one it killed and outputs the message on the console and in /var/log/messages. The 'System Error' message only appears in /var/log/cron

At the Linux level (kernel level), CPU time and memory size are set to unlimited. I was thinking more along the CRON level, are there any limitation to vixie-cron itself that would cause CRON to kill a process (i.e. cronjob) ?

Not that I'm aware of. There are other limits system that can be exceeded besides CPU and memory. Most distributions have a default maximum on user processes (if a processes goes into a loop spawning processes), and open files (a loop opening temp files, for example). The result will be the same - the process will fail.