cron running away...

[GaryWayneSmith]

I setup the crontab as show in the samples. We created a general group accout to pull email from one of our contact feedback user accounts, 10k messages. The job starts, run's 60 seconds, then another one starts, runs 60 seconds, then another, etc... We had 10+ of them going at the same time. Each one was downloading duplicate messages.

As a temp work around, I disabled cron, deleted all of the emails (from emails and emails_users), set php execution time to 24 hours and then ran the job. The problem is the bandwidth flutuates between 10mb to 1mb (pulling from a remote source).

My question is how to prevent this race condition in the future. Let's say, the inbox receives email enough that requires the cron to pull it over a period of more than 60 seconds. Is there a way to prevent this?

Version 4.5.1e (Build 1049)

[agupta]

Gary,

You should change the frequency of the job that reads inbound emails. the default frequency is 'as often as possible'. You can do this from the admin panel.

go to - admin->scheduler
Find 'check inbound mailboxes' job
change the job frequency to a higher value..


-Ajay

[GaryWayneSmith]

I understand, but the problem is I would have to set it for some arbitrary large amount of time because it might take a long time to clear out the account across the wire.

But this problem is almost secondary. This wouldn't be too much of an issue except that it keeps pulling duplicates. This is a bigger problem. If it wasn't for the duplicates, I wouldn't care because only one thread should be able to pull a message at a time. If Exchange would lock POP3 correctly in accordance with the RFC's then the additional instances would be deadlocked so this wouldn't matter, but it does in this case.