Bug 69294 – Thousands of CRON processes (vixie-cron - syslog-ng)

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Michael Van Damme 2004-10-28 10:05:27 UTC]

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.

[Comment 1 Daniel Black (RETIRED) 2004-10-28 17:44:35 UTC]

my guess would be the cron jobs you are running aren't exiting.

[Comment 2 Michael Van Damme 2004-10-28 18:43:22 UTC]

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.

[Comment 3 Michael Van Damme 2004-11-27 20:34:55 UTC]

The problem has disappeared since I activated log rotation. So probably
the problem is in syslog-ng, and not vixie-cron.

[Comment 4 Aaron Walker (RETIRED) 2004-12-12 08:07:19 UTC]

closing.