Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by M Gardner -
Number of replies: 7
I hope someone can help

Sitting on a windows server I've recently upgraded to 1.6.2
However ever since this upgrade the cron backup has not been working.

Whenever I run cron manually I get the following:
Running backups if required...
    Checking backup status...RUNNING
    No activity in last 30 minutes. Unlocking status
    Getting admin info
    Deleting old data
    Checking courses
        Skipping deleted courses
            0 courses
        <<Name of MOODLE>>
            Next execution: Friday,  29 September 2006, 10:00 PM
        D201: Using ICT - Introduction
            Executing backup
It then locks at this point.

I really need this sorting out - but am stuck as to how to fix the problem.

Help is much appreciated.
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In reply to M Gardner

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Geoffrey Rowland -
Picture of Plugin developers
Hi

You are not alone with this. I have posted about this scheduled backup problem, and there seem to be a few other similar unresolved threads. Our case has particular irony, as our upgrade from 1.5.x to 1.6.x was driven by the need to get (manual) backups of the Gallery 2 module working (which it did!).

Individual course backups seem to work fine, so I don't think there is any problem with backup per se, database structure, UTF format etc. In our case, some other memory/resource/time-out limit in the CentOS/Apache/PHP/MySQL/Moodle setup seems to be causing the sheduled backup to stall.

It would be really useful and, with the imment release of Moodle 1.6.3, timely if any Moodle backup gurus would investigate this and come up with a solution.

Thanks

Geoff
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In reply to Geoffrey Rowland

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by M Gardner -
This is a serious issue for me, can anyone help?

Thanks

Malcolm
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In reply to M Gardner

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Eric Kemsley -
Anyone figure this out yet? I have the same problem.
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In reply to Eric Kemsley

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Eric Kemsley -
When I looked at /var/www/html/admin/cron.php, it was a blank file. I copied the cron.php from /dev/backup/moodle_backup/html/admin/cron.php to the admin folder and it now works fine.
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In reply to Geoffrey Rowland

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Eric Eberhardt -
I am having this problem as well. It is a serious issue and any insight would be great. The cron seems to run fine, but when the backup routine starts, the cron stops functioning after that. I've tried using MoodleCron, task scheduler, and wget methods and all have the same results.

I can manually run the cron script in some cases and most of the time the backup works then, but even so sometimes it stalls. Is this possibility related to memory or PHP memory limits in some way?

I have experienced this same problem on 1.5.3 and 1.6.3. I don't know if 1.6.4 has addressed these issues. 1.7 is not an option for us yet because we need a Score locking (AL) module and there are none for 1.7+ as of yet.

Thank you,

Eric
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In reply to Eric Eberhardt

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Justin Pohlmann -
Eric and all-

We were having a very similar problem, running MoodleCron as a service would constantly die. What we ended up doing is running the cron page remotely from a Linux machine using cron and wget, and the page works fine now, though we are still experiencing issues with a number of our course backups erroring out. At least the task no longer freezes.
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In reply to Justin Pohlmann

Re: Cron not working since 1.6x upgrade

by Eric Eberhardt -
Justin,

We have tried running the script remotely, but it seems like it still hangs. It seems to hang on large courses or courses with a large amount of users. The cron runs beautifully until the backup script executes each night then it hangs. We've tried adjusting the memory and execution limits in the backup_scheduler.php file, but it still seems to hang.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Eric
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