UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I added a shell script to cron that executes every 5-15 minutes. It's used to monitor multiple environments, so it has to ssh to each machine to check the status of that machine. Sometimes, I may have more than one instance of this script running at the same time. So, here's my problem. I've noticed that sometimes, certain environments don't finish running the script. I'm thinking that the issue is that the script doesn't finish the ssh. When I run the script manually, it works every time. I was wondering if cron jobs are executed with some lower processing priority. Is there a command that will make these scripts run with a higher priority? Are there any ideas out there as to what's going on with the jobs? I noticed that after spacing the jobs out a little, it helped smooth out the number of failed jobs. The failures still happen, just not as many.


Thanks in advance for all responses.

i guess priority will not be changed for cron job process... anyway you can increase/decrease priority with nice command Hack 100. Nice Command Examples

@mrwatkins:

While I have some ideas about what could be failing, can you please give us some samples of what you are trying to do: the crontab entry that starts everything, the script containing the ssh calls, the scripts that are run on the remote system?