[ltp] R52 - pdflush on large disk operations

Brad Langhorst linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Thu, 08 Sep 2005 12:32:58 -0400


On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 01:38 +0930, Onno Benschop wrote:

> The behaviour I saw was that cron was forking all over the place, the 
> machine getting slower and slower. At one stage I had 86 cron processes 
> running which couldn't be killed. (You should know that I have two cron 
> jobs that run each minute to log traffic and current active window - 
> part of my client billing process.)


i don't know why a split command would have an effect on cron... but i
suspect that the problem lies in the programs you are running in cron -
not cron itself.

try running /bin/true in place of your scripts to see if you still get
the strange behaviour.

IMHO any system that requires cron jobs to be triggered every minute is
inherently broken and should be replaced with a daemon.

brad