cron to kill any long running processes

[starchild]

We have a really weird thing where by a particular file occasionally wont stop processing.

This process chews up RAM and then load spikes and brings the server to it's knees.

We simply can't work out what the issue is.

Is there something we can run that periodically check to see if any processes have been going for > N minutes and then kills them?

We have set timeouts etc but they don't affect this random issue for some weird reason.

Thanks in advance.

[wilderness]

Best of luck with crons.

Some months back I implemented some crons (which I had absolutely no understanding of) and had a difficult time finding assistance.

Don't recall the forum, however pretty sure it wasn't the Apache forum.

[TypicalSurfer]

poke around for "cron to kill runaway process"

[brotherhood of LAN]

[swoolley.org...]

If the process spawns children then that may be something to look at as they could still be running after the main script exits.