Re: Cron jobs not running (fwd)

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     There is a configurable limit to the number of cron jobs that can execute
simultaneously intended to prevent the system from being bogged by many cron
jobs executing at the same time.

     One of our customers had a few cron jobs that attempted to ftp files to
a remote ftp server that occasionally did not respond, causing these processes
to get "stuck" waiting for the remote server to complete.

     After a few of these stuck it would fill up all available slots preventing
other users cron jobs from running. 

     I have increased the number of slots, killed the stuck jobs, and commented
out the crontab entry launching them.

     Right now a large backlog of cron jobs is executing which is causing a
high load on the shell server.

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Eskimo North Support wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 14:26:31 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Cyber Mâdhva Sangha <dvaita@dvaita.org>
> To: support@eskimo.com
> Cc: support@dvaita.net
> Subject: Cron jobs not running
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I would appreciate it if you could look into why cron jobs on eskimo.com
> are not running (at least, ours aren't).  We haven't done anything to
> cause such a change, and doing `crontab -l' brings up the same list as
> before so I know the setup is the same.  I first noticed that cron jobs
> seemed to be off on the 2d, but thought it might be temporary, but no job
> invocations seem to have happened since.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Shrisha Rao