I'm experiencing weird behaviour with vixie-cron. Every couple of days, my cron jobs aren't being started anymore, and ps uax shows thousands (really, thousands) of processes named /USR/SBIN/CRON (in capitals). The only reasonable way to kill them is writing a small script. I don't see anything in the logs, because when this happens, syslog-ng has crashed (it has to be killed with kill -9). Any ideas? I'm using vixie-cron 3.0.1-r4, syslog-ng 1.6.5-r1 and vanilla kernel 2.4.27. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
my guess would be the cron jobs you are running aren't exiting.
I think they aren't starting (or hang immediately). The reason is this: every hour, a cron job generates webserver statistics. When the problem arises, the statistics aren't updated anymore, yet no process that is supposed to do this exists (hung or not). So apparently, cron hangs before creating the processes it should create. The problem can't be in the cron jibs themselves, because the problem can take days to appear, and in the meantime the jobs run fine.
The problem has disappeared since I activated log rotation. So probably the problem is in syslog-ng, and not vixie-cron.
closing.
