Re: [gentoo-user] Re: vixie-cron keeps stopping

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Friday 16 April 2010 19:58:23 Francesco Talamona wrote:
> On Thursday 15 April 2010, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > On Thursday 15 April 2010 02:58:15 Matt Harrison wrote:
> > > I apologise if this has come twice, it didn't appear to post
> > > correctly first time, not even on the archives.
> > > 
> > > Its been happening for a while but I haven't got round to find out
> > > why, but every so often (anything between a week or an hour)
> > > vixie-cron just stops. There's nothing in the logs, the service
> > > just stops.
> > > 
> > > I have no idea where to start looking for a culprit so I'm hoping
> > > someone here has some good ideas :)
> > > 
> > > thanks in advance
> > > 
> > > Matt
> > 
> > You probably don't want to hear this, but:
> > 
> > vixie-cron is problematic in the extreme. I have endless hassle with
> > it's weird behaviours.
> > 
> > Use a different cron daemon.
> 
> Your advice is vague :)

To answer this point:

vixie-cron does not reliably restart. You have to remember to kill it, verify 
that it is indeed dead, then start it.

Of course, my use case is a lot more complex than just /etc/cron.*/* and yes, 
I do expect a cron daemon to cope with my needs in it's stride. It's not hard 
to cope with a 1000 line crontab. I have auth daemons running on ancient 
hardware with 256M RAM that have to deal with 100+ auth requests a second and 
a 5000-line config file. Despite my needs being complex, any cron daemon 
should cope with that without breaking a sweat

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com