[CentOS] rsync via crontab spawns over 20 processes

Fri Jan 21 20:16:23 UTC 2011
aurfalien at gmail.com <aurfalien at gmail.com>

On Jan 21, 2011, at 12:09 PM, Don Krause wrote:

>
> On Jan 21, 2011, at 12:05 PM, aurfalien at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> On Jan 21, 2011, at 11:54 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/21/2011 1:30 PM, aurfalien at gmail.com wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I've been running rsync via cron for a while now and all is well.
>>>>
>>>> However on one particular new 5.5 box, whenever its runs via  
>>>> crontab,
>>>> the machine ends up with over 20 rsync processes and a load of ~14
>>>> and
>>>> eventually the machine dies.
>>>>
>>>> But when running manually, I see it spawn 3 processes with a load  
>>>> of
>>>> 1.5.
>>>>
>>>> My rsync command is simply;
>>>>
>>>> rsync --delete -avvH --progress source target
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts?
>>>
>>> It sounds like it is not completing one run before the next one
>>> starts.
>>> If you have a lot of hardlinks, the -H option can make things slower
>>> than you would expect.
>>
>> No hard links, some sym links.
>>
>> But I see what you are saying.
>>
>> Here is my crontab entry via /etc/crontab
>>
>> * 22 * * * root rsync --delete -avvH --progress source target
>>
>> - aurf
>
> If that's your crontab, you do see that you are actually starting a  
> separate copy of the command every minute in 10PM.
>
> No wonder you're killing you machine, try
>
> 0 22 * * * .....


Yes my bad, a big miss.

Explains why I probably had 24 processes :)

Can you say doh!