Cron Chronicles

[Iki]

Hi all,

 

I've been running a cron on my site for a few months now that rebuilds my MT blog every night. It's worked like a charm...

 

...until last night when it suddenly hogged over 50% of the server CPU and my account got suspended.

 

A Helpdesk ticket explained the problem to me and reactivated me so I could go delete that little bugger so I'm good to go now, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas about why that would happen? What would make that thing work every night for so long and then suddenly crap out? I'm not going to put it back in there because it's all suspicious now and I like my TCH account alot and I'd like to keep it.

 

Is it possible that it, like, hung during the rebuild or something? I don't know alot about CRONs and what the behavior is. Is there a bit of code I can stick in there to tell it to "die" if it hangs or something?

 

Any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

 

-Iki

[LisaJill]

There is absolutely no way that we can help without knoowing what the cron job is, and what it does. Can you post it?

 

Do manual rebuilds cause you any problems? Did cron happen to email you any errors?

[Iki]

I didn't get any errors, but it runs silently. Don't know about manual rebuilding becasue I'm scared to do that now.

 

Let me gather the script and the cron stuff and I'll post it in here in a bit.

 

Thanks!

[LisaJill]

Cron always runs silently but emails errors. If you have an email address set for it to send to. =)

 

I hate to say it but you're going to have to try rebuilding at some point - heck, what if someone comments or something? You may want to submit a ticket to the Help Desk and ask them when is a good time and if they can monitor it so that you can take it offline if it's broken. =) I definitely wouldn't do anything of the sort without their assistance at this point.

[Iki]

Nope, no error emails. And I'd get one because when I was setting up the crons I was getting them before I got the syntax right.

 

(Me <--- Newbie Cron Chick)

 

Normally, I run three cron jobs a night. The first is a backup of the mysql database which I got out of these forums somewhere that I think came from you, Lisa. Excellent bit of cron, that.

 

The next job I run is a php file that closes all comments on any post more than 10 days old by going into the mysql database and changing the allow_comments table.

 

The third one is mt-rebuild.pl which you can see here. Looking at this now, I think that his MT-Closure thing might be better than the full rebuild thing, and then I could do away with the closecomments.php cron job also. Although I'll probably still have to rebuild.

 

I don't know why I'm playing with this stuff anyway - I don't get spam.

 

I'll put in a help desk ticket before doing a rebuild and see what happens.

 

-Iki