On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 08:41:01AM -0500, Dave Alden wrote: > > Hi, > I've got the exact same problem. :-( The load on this workstation is > up to 478. :-) I received no mail fron cron and there is nothing out > of the ordinary in any of the logfiles in /var/log... .... > did a /etc/init.d/crond restart). I have a process that runs every > 5 minutes and it's last entry was at 16:40:00 in /var/log/cron. If you start a process every 5 min that takes 5 min and 2 seconds you will eventually run out of something.... It takes a little more than 12 hours for you to have two running all the time. then 25 hours later you have three.... Since the system will get busy in the small hours (night) things that finish just fine in the day could break at night. Make sure you pay attention to how long things take 7x24 for things like this. Always watch for exceptions.... Your launcher might check the load average (parse output of 'w') and not launch if the system is too loaded.... It is possible to "time" processes with a wrapper. When they take too long, log or send a message. Runaway systems are hard to debug.... One trick is to run "script" when lodged into the trouble machine (over the net) and run shell scripts that loop on things like a full "ps" listing, "lsof", "df -a", "w", "netstat -a". The /proc file-system has lots of info... Also make sure that these are not zombie process for which some script/component forgot to do a "wait". Do not send all output and errors to /dev/null when debugging. -- T o m M i t c h e l l mitch48-at-sbcglobal-dot-net
