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10.4: One solution to a launchd-cron CPU usage issue
Authored by: Michael Levin on Nov 01, '05 01:23:05PM

Aha!! This might be what's happening to us. I'm a biologist with a fading memory of Unix administration from 10 years ago... I just set up a Tiger Xserve for our lab and everything was fine for a while and then the CPUs started maxing out at 100% due to cron activity! I suspect I may have the same problem as reported here. How in general can I avoid this in the future? I won't be using Finder to dig around in those folders, but if something does show up in that directory which causes cron to crash and be restarted, I'll have a problem again. How do people manage this issue? Is it really necessary for "cron to watch the /var/cron/tabs directory for new crontabs"? Can I turn that feature off, or is there a better/more elegant way to make sure this never happens? What should be in that directory, anyway? Currently, I see:

[mail:~] mlevin% ls -al /var/cron/tabs
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 Nov 1 10:57 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 2005 ..
-rw------- 1 root wheel 278 Oct 18 10:12 cyrusimap
-rw------- 1 root wheel 689 Nov 1 10:57 diradmin
-rw------- 1 root wheel 1490 Nov 1 10:57 mailman
-rw------- 1 root wheel 278 Nov 1 10:57 root
-rw------- 1 root wheel 268 Oct 10 03:14 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 275 Nov 1 10:21 tmp.995

any help would be greatly appreciated. I need to know how to keep that directory clean! Thanks in advance.

Mike



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