topic Re: Cron issue in Operating System - HP-UX

Cron issue

Rahul Pednekar — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:28:00 GMT

Hello All

Cron is not running any jobs in crontab, in the cron logs all i get is the following.. around hundreds of messages every minute.
-------------------------------------------
! a queue max run limit reached Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! rescheduling at job Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! a queue max run limit reached Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! rescheduling at job Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! a queue max run limit reached Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! rescheduling at job Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! a queue max run limit reached Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! rescheduling at job Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! a queue max run limit reached Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
! rescheduling at job Mon Jan 14 09:21:23 CST 2008
----------------------------------------------

I cleared the crontab but still I'm getting those messages. even tried with stop and start the cron, but nothing works. would anybody help me with this.

Thanks

Rahul.

Re: Cron issue

Ralph Grothe — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:36:13 GMT

Adapt your queues.
See "man queuedefs"

Re: Cron issue

James R. Ferguson — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:37:42 GMT

Hi Rahul:

You have the maximum number of jobs already running and 'cron' will not start any more: "a queue max run limit reached ". The 'a' is queue 'a'. See:

http://docs.hp.com/en/B3921-60631/queuedefs.4.html

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Cron issue

Pete Randall — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:46:54 GMT

The "a" queue is for at jobs. Try doing an "at -l" and see what you have for jobs queued up.

The limit is defined in, and may be able to be raised via, /var/adm/cron/queuedefs (see queuedefs(4)).

Pete

Re: Cron issue

Doug O'Leary — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:53:49 GMT

wow; talk about timing. I just ran into this issue just this morning.

1. ps -ef | grep cron; ID the PID that's running cron
2. ps -ef | grep ${pid}

You'll probably find 200+ jobs that were run via cron. Kill them and cron will start working again.

The short answer is that the script/process isn't dying so it's not freeing up the queue entry in cron. Once that fills up, no more cron jobs can be run.

After you kill all the extraneous processes, comment the script out of whatever cron tab started it and then fix the script.

Doug