Moodle in English: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Michael Deal - Friday, August 8, 2014, 11:55 AM

Hello all,

We are running into a strange phenomenon in a select few of our restored courses. We are migrating from 2.4.6 to 2.6.4 for the upcoming year. In a few classes that have been restored, the cron will log a calendar edit every time it runs. These edits only affect assignments in the class. If I go in and remove the check mark for enabling any time constraint (due date, cut-off date, etc), the cron will no longer update the calendar in that course.

I have tried resetting the course, re-importing the course, and deleting the calendar to no avail. Is there any way to get more detailed logs as to what exactly is being updated in the calendars? A new assignment created in the course is not affected, but assignments that were brought over in an affected class are.

Thanks,

Mike

Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Steven Geggie - Saturday, August 9, 2014, 4:10 AM

I'm seeing the same thing....we upgraded from 2.5 to 2.64. The logs are now reporting calendar updates every 15 minutes. I'm concerned about the bloat this creates

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by James McLean - Monday, August 11, 2014, 7:19 AM

I recently discovered a bug in the event dequeue which was affecting some cron events (not directly related to calendar though), but having the event execute every cron execution sounds similar.

Can you guys please check your events tables and see if you have cron events that never dequeue?

The tracker issue I created is https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-46411

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Steven Geggie - Monday, August 11, 2014, 10:12 PM

The only table with any entries in them is mdl_events.

The other events tables are empty. When I remove all entries from mdl_events, they reappear the next time I run cron.

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by James McLean - Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 7:29 AM

Thanks. Doesn't sound related.

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Michael Veit - Friday, August 15, 2014, 6:07 PM

Hello James,

thanks for the code (https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-46411). I tested the new code but there was no change. The old events were still updated constantly by cronjob. Do I need to do in advance anythink else?

The due dates of different assignments were written in the calendar and are continually updated. These are events of two assignments in two different courses. Not all assignments are restored.
This only happens after the update from Version 2.6.3 to 2.6.4.

What could be the cause?

Regards

Michael

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Michael Veit - Friday, August 15, 2014, 6:40 PM

Supplement:
Furhter interesting: Editing the calendar event by cronjob is recorded in the log report under the name of the administrator.

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Bernd Albers - Sunday, August 17, 2014, 2:10 AM

I see the same effects after an update from Moodle 2.6.2 to 2.7.1:

Admin updates calender events for 7 assignments in 5 different courses every 5 minutes (time of the cronjob).

The code-change had no effect.

This still seems to be the easiest way to stop it:

"If I go in and remove the check mark for enabling any time constraint (due date, cut-off date, etc), the cron will no longer update the calendar in that course."

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by AL Rachels - Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 9:04 AM

I am seeing the same thing in Moodle 2.7.1+ in a site I created just three weeks ago using mostly restored courses and assignments. There were only three assignments causing the calendar updates and log entries, one each every 15 minutes. I can foresee that this will probably cause some people big problems before too long as in three weeks this has generated 107 LONG pages in my logs. The potential to fill the hard drive space looks pretty high to me on a busy site with lots of due dates. The log is already so large, that when I tried to download it in Excel format, it failed... unserailized data......

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Jacques Monnard - Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 11:03 PM

Same here (Moodle 2.7.1). This is probably bug MDL-46539 (vote for it!). It happens only for assignments where "Allow submissions from" is enabled AND "Always show description" is disabled (this field is normally checked by default, which explains why the problem happens only in a few assignments).

As a workaround until the bug is fixed, you can re-enable "Always show description" in the assignement settings. If the teacher wants to hide the assignement until a specific date, s/he can use an access restriction further down in the settings.

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Jon Marthaler - Thursday, August 21, 2014, 12:49 AM

Looks like the fix for MDL-37509 is causing some problems. See the tracker ticket at MDL-46539 - a fix to prevent assignments from showing up in the calendar before they're available is now causing those assignments to drop an entry in the log every time the cron is run.

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Re: Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses

by Jon Marthaler - Friday, August 22, 2014, 5:34 AM

Want to update with a full(er) explanation of what is going on (at least, in my experience).

If you set a due date on an assignment, an event on the calendar was created - including the assignment description, even if "Always show description" was set to disabled. MDL-37509 was created and addressed to take care of this; the update was set to use the assign cron, with the following logic:

If "Always show description" is set to disabled, AND
Submissions for the assignment are allowed ("Allow submissions from" is a past date/time), AND
Submissions for the assignment are being allowed since the last time the assign cron ran, AND
The assignment has a due date set (and therefore an associated calendar event)
THEN update the calendar event to include the description.

Hence, thanks to the fix, the description for the assignment wouldn't show in the calendar until after submissions were open.

The problem was that a bug prevented checking the time of the last assign cron run. This meant that the cron was getting a list of all of the assignments with "Always show description" set to disabled, since the beginning of time up until now, and updating the events for their due dates. For every update, a log entry was recorded - which is why people saw this, especially in old courses that were imported.

I posted a simple fix on MDL-46539 - we deployed that today and it's working correctly. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next moodle.org release.

Hope this makes sense for anybody who's still looking for an explanation of what's going on...

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Cron job is endlessly editing calendar in specific restored courses