UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi there

I have a cronjob running on a sol 10 U6 server which runs every 15 minutes. The cronjob is a perl script. But I have noticed that after every few weeks the job stops running all of a sudden. There are other cronjobs running on the system from the same user and from other users which work fine, it is just this one job from one user that causes the problem.

any ideas?

Thanks

Error in perl script, perhaps writing to a file, etc.?

Review perl error logs.....

... and look for core dumps. This should tell you if it is a kernel resource issue.

1. Check your local mail account - errors from cron are sent there.

2. Check your perl scripts. Dumps, logs... anything.

3. Reconsider your application's architecture. Why you are using cron? Have you ever heard about event based processing?
I have seen applications that were executed every minute from cron to check if there is something to do for them...
Essentially that is causing extra application execution every 1 minute, extra server load that happen 24*60*60=86400 executions per day. Usually there is no processing - so we can have ex. 85000 pointless tasks consuming server's power.
Additionally some of those apps would have significant problems if the server went down for some time and some cron jobs were skipped.
That is not the case is you have event based processing (or at least - it shouldn't be the case assuming that the application's architecture and design are correct).

Good luck