[Labs-l] toollabs cronjobs not running reliably

Sun Jan 17 11:25:27 UTC 2016

Hello all,

Recently, we have been having some issues with cronjobs not running
reliably [1]. One of the reasons for this is that almost 300 tasks are
scheduled to run exactly at midnight, overloading the server.

We are working on resolving the issue, but in the meanwhile, please take a
look at your crontab. The busiest times are:
 - midnight, then
 - every whole hour, then
 - every half hour, then
 - every 15 minutes, then
 - every 5 minutes.

If the exact timing is not that important, consider moving your job away
from the hotspots. For example, if you have a job that runs daily, consider
running it at 4:23 instead of midnight. If you have a job that runs hourly,
consider running it not at the whole hour, but at some other minute. This
will help to keep cron available for jobs that //must// schedule at that
exact time (e.g. something that rotates pages at midnight).

Merlijn

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123186
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