Cron not running every hour [#698892]

For quite a while now, I have noticed with concern that some cron triggered functions like aggregator feed update or looking for module updates have not been running as they did before.

I read in some post that cron runs if a site has some good bit of traffic or something like that.
My site has on average 30 visitors/day.
In spite of spending sometime on the site my self, the feeds dont update & under available updates, it shows many hours or even days since the last run.
The last 2 times including today, I got a report it had run only after logging in & going to the recent log entry pages.
What of I did not?
I have on some days run cron manually to get available updates + update news feeds.

I looked in the logs & see reports suggesting cron run, like " aggregator 29.01.2010 - 01:25 There is new syndicated content from Allafrica: ...", but it seems the feeds were not updated at that particular time.

I also found 2 such entries for last night:

Message Cron has been running for more than an hour and is most likely stuck.
Severity error

I went to the /run-cron-check page & got this: "{ "cron_run": false }"

What does this mean?

I have always set cron to run hourly. Is there anything more that can be done so it carries out the tasks it has always done in the past, without having to worry about it? News feeds, which are quite important to the site used where always fresh ...

Regards

Comments

Comment #1

Ela CreditAttribution: Ela commented 29 January 2010 at 20:33

I'm also having this problem. I've changed the settings from every 3 hours to 12 hours and now every time I try to manually run cron it fails because "it is already running" and also get the same "Cron has been running for more than an hour and is most likely stuck."
However, it does trigger boost to start crawling the site and other modules, like lucene search

Comment #2

mdih CreditAttribution: mdih commented 1 February 2010 at 20:25

Comment #3

Dave Reid

he/him

English

Nebraska USA

CreditAttribution: Dave Reid commented 1 February 2010 at 20:52

Status:

Active

» Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

This probably means a module that implements cron is not running properly, not necessarily a poormanscron problem. Try using a cron debugging module like http://drupal.org/project/supercron or http://drupal.org/project/elysia_cron. Also try and manually remove the 'cron_threshold' variable from your {variables} table.

Comment #4

lionheart8 CreditAttribution: lionheart8 commented 8 February 2010 at 16:24

Thanks for the response.

I installed supercron & only the few crons I "invoked" had run after over 1 hour. Poormanscron is set to run hourly. May be I need to give it some more time, before trying out "elysia_cron".

In the "Variables" table, the only instance of 'cron_threshold' was "('cron_threshold_semaphore', 'i:1265639563;');".
Is it only the value or everything related to it in the table that should be deleted manually?

Before installing supercron, poormanscron, which is set to run hourly runs at times, but I have not yet established the pattern, because I can stay on the site for a while, doing different things, even on aggregator pages, but nothing seems to trigger it to run, whereas at times, something seems to. The times I have noted this, is when I was logged in. I dont see cron being triggered when one loads a page, because in that case at least most feeds would be updated as some sources update news quite frequently & many times a day, whereas some feeds on the site are, 2, 3 days old with no update.

Under Supercron, all "Names", except the few I invoked have "Name Invoke Last called Execution Time Avg. Execution Time Output Exceptions Enabled Multithread =>

account_reminder Invoke Never successfully ran Never successfully ran Never successfully ran", respectively.

Comment #5

Ela CreditAttribution: Ela commented 8 February 2010 at 17:39

Dave.. I wonder if it had anything to do with the XML sitemap.
After upgrading from unstable to 6.x-2.0-alpha1, the problem seems to no longer exist. I can't however confirm what was causing it and if it is for sure gone.. it just seems so far that the cron is running well, even if run manually (which was a problem most of the time before)