wusage and cron

[rudiger]

Lately our cobolt raq4 server has been crashing regularly due to it being overloaded. I've tracked the problem to our webstats program, wusage which is scheduled to run far to regularly (once every hour!). The problem lies in that wusage will periodically overwrite any changes I make to its crontab making it run on the hour every hour.

I've tried removing the crontab for wusage completely and getting it to run via /etc/cron.daily but once running it creates a crontab for itself.

Anybody have any suggestions? The crashes are starting to affect out business so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[bartek]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, rudiger! (<-- yessss... always wanted to do that) :)

Can you post your crontab entry, your wusage.conf and wusage version (if not in the wusage.conf file)?

[rudiger]

Im running version 8. I've checked out the FAQS and manuals from www.wusage.com but no similar problems listed.
The check to see if the web interface is up runs every five minutes and the actual running happens every hour. I've included the whole crontab below.

0 * * * * /home/sites/home/users/wusage/wusage8.0/wusage -p 2396 -wusage-scheduled-updates -home /home/sites/home/users/wusage/

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * /home/sites/home/users/wusage/wusage8.0/wusage -p 2396 -wusage-check-server -home /home/sites/home/users/wusage/

The "-wusage-scheduled-updates" parameter tells wusage to analyze all my virtual sites. I can't really post the wusage.conf because there's one for each virtual site and each is a few pages long. Also I'm not using any wusage interface and just editing the config files directly.

[bartek]

-wusage-check-server
The -wusage-check-server option causes Wusage to check to see whether it is currently installed on port 2396 to talk to web-based clients. If the program is not already running, it is launched in the background to accept such connections. This is very similar to the behavior of the program with no command line arguments, except that no error message is produced if the port is already in use; the program assumes that it is already running properly in another process. Wusage 8.0 P8 and above for Unix automatically install a scheduled cron job which causes the program to be launched with this option every 5 minutes (terminating instantly if it has no work to do, of course). This removes the need for manual installation in Unix startup scripts and provides a "watchdog" in case the program shuts down for any reason.

-wusage-scheduled-update
The -wusage-scheduled-update option causes a complete update of all Wusage accounts and configuration files, including log rotation and archiving if they have been turned on, if it is time to do so according to the current built-in scheduler settings. Beginning in Wusage 7.0, the Unix versions of Wusage automatically request that the Unix cron service run the program at the top of the hour with this option. The Windows version runs such scheduled updates via its NT service. An actual update takes place only at the top of the appropriate hour on appropriate days, as indicated through the Schedule Updates button on the Account Administration Page...

I think you can safely remove one of these entries from cron - you don't really need to run them both? Also note that it is -wusage-scheduled-update (not updates)...
hth