Cron MAXRUN error

[Carlos_8]

Has anyone ever seen this error in /var/adm/cron/log.

!MAXRUN (100) procs reached Mon Apr 30 11:45:01 EDT 2001

! rescheduling a cron job Mon Apr 30 11:45:01 EDT 2001

This was the first error and then it became more frequent after that until no jobs would run. It came to my attention because our OmniBack jobs were not automatically starting. I solved the problem by a simple restart of cron. Uptime on the server was about 28 days. Can anyone tell me if this is something I have to look forward to with long server uptime?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Carlos,
To the best of my knowledge, cron's hard-coded limit of MAXRUN is 100 processes. It used to be 40. That does not mean that you can't have more than 100 cronjobs just not more than 100 simultaneous jobs. I suspect that what is really going on is that you have cronjobs which are spawned and never finish for some reason. That's what I would look for. I suspect unless you find them the problem will reappear.

Hope this helps, Clay

[Carlos_8]

Thanks,
I never knew that there was a hard coded limit to simultaneous cron jobs. I will need to look at the scheduling of our jobs and if some are hanging. We only have a total of 12-15 jobs in crontab, so this leads me to believe there is another underlying problem.