cron spawning many instances, machine locking

Crisis · l33t Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 613 Location: Portland, OR

Well I am having a problem on one of my gentoo boxes as follows.

It seems that CRON keeps running and leaving a process open to the point where there could be hundres of cron processes running. ONce it does this the machine will not respond to just about any command, including even shutdown -r now. Only way to fix it is to physically reboot the machine.

Now I am not sure if the cron instances are causing this, or if they are a symptom of a different problem. They are the only thing I can see that looks odd.

Here is a snippit of ps aux:

adaptr · Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 2:37 pm Post subject:

Well, run-crons runs the appropriate jobs in /etc/cron.hourly|daily|weekly|monthly, so maybe one of those jobs is faulty ?
Or a job takes too long to complete, but probably the former...
_________________
>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

Crisis · l33t Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 613 Location: Portland, OR

The cron jobs on this box are really standard, haven't edited them:

adaptr · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 12:21 pm Post subject:

Hmmm.
This kind of behaviour is usually related to processes respawning too fast - either from a super-server (like apache or mysql) or from init.

Have you tried replacing it with another cron ?
_________________
>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

Crisis · l33t Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 613 Location: Portland, OR

I took off vixie-cron and replaced it with dcron, we shall see if this happens again.

Crisis · l33t Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 613 Location: Portland, OR

I'm writing this one off to a bad motherboard as the problems are increasing and I'm seeing random coruption etc.

adaptr · Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 7:09 pm Post subject:

Before you throw it away in disgust ;-)

Try running stresslinux on it overnight.
Random failures are also frequently caused by bad power supplies - which are far more common than faulty motherboards.
_________________
>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

Crisis · l33t Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 613 Location: Portland, OR

True, but there are a lot more details not mentioned here regarding the hardware in this machine that had not been mentioned.

Namely that this is the third hardrive this machine has had, all of which have eventually started to do random corupt writes after time which leads me to believe it is an IDE controller problem and not bad hard drives in the past.

Also the 3v and 5v rails ar ereading fine on this PSU so I am being led to believe it is a bad IDE controller.

Hopefully in the next week or so I can try a different mobo and tell for sure.

Tyrian · n00b Joined: 16 Sep 2003 Posts: 5

Hm. I'm having these same problems on a Dell 4600. Load was over 600 when I logged in yesterday.

Killing all the rogue procs and restarting cron seemed to fix it for a while, but at some point this morning, my box locked up. None of the logs indicate anything super odd, so I'm still trying to figure out where this is coming from.