wp-cron causing excessive processes

Could have been a plugin though.

Now that a suitable amount of time has elapsed, I can confirm that the following sorted my particular issues:

Resetting my global PHP.ini file to following:
CORE: memory_limit = 96Mb
OPTIONS & INFORMATION: max_execution_time = 60secs

For sites with any significant traffic, I also disabled wp-cron in the wp-config.php file and set up cron jobs in cPanel (for each site and subdomain) to run at regular intervals, generally 4-6hrs. All as detailed above.

This then fixed the issues almost immediately.

Further to that, I recently noticed that 1Gb of RAM had “dropped off” my VPS (should’ve had 2Gb. but it was only operating with 1Gb!!!!). So I politely requested my hosting provider find the extra RAM and reapply it…

This actually may have been the catalyst for the problems in the first place, but clearly the first two actions fixed the server load before I noticed the missing RAM and WP leaner and meaner the first place.

I’m currently running about 15-20 separate WP installs on the same VPS, most with multiple subdomains.

Dang I wish we could like forum posts. ??

Ditto.

Have you checked out 3.1 yet? IIRC is has some cron helpage (ONLY the main site kicks off certain jobs, iirc).

No I’ve not gone to WP 3.1 yet, as the sites that were causing me grief are all using TDO Mini Forms and from what I understand, that plugin no longer works with 3.1. Grrrr….

However, on the other sites, I’m maintaining the installs via Subversion, so upgrading those shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Thanks mrarrow for your cron’s adventures feedback ??

I’m trying myself to shed some light upon missing scheduled posts in a network of 100+ blogs of a WP3 multisite installation, WP-super-cache enabled.

I’ve pretty much followed the instructions listed here to crontab a custom wp-cron-all.php script, but authors of some blogs report that their scheduled posts doesn’t get published, dashboard reports “missing schedule”.

wp-cron-all.php is crontabbed to run every 15 minutes.

This file contains among other things a loop made this way:

foreach ($blogs as $blog) {
	$cronStartTime = microtime(true);

	echo date('Y/m/d H:i:s', $cronStartTime) . " Starting wp-cron for $blog->domain"."$blog->path...";
	$cron_url = $blog->domain . $blog->path . 'wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron';
	wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => false) );

	$cronEndTime = microtime(true);
	$duration = $cronEndTime - $cronStartTime;
	echo " (completed in ". $duration ." seconds)<br />\r\n";
}

The log.txt that is output indicates that every call to blogXXX/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron is executed correctly. (I don’t know what “doing_wp_cron” is for).

But if I run a-blog/wp.cron.php manually from a browser, it loads and loads and loads, never ends, this makes me think.

Trying to re-enable default WP cron, removing the constant from wp-config.php, caused the server to freeze, and needed to reboot.

I also have had some issues with many wp-cron processes running and causing CPU throttling.
As I knew which plugin was running, rather than disabling wp-cron on wp-config.php (I am not brave enough .), I came up with a few lines of code using API_transient that make the trick.

$prefix = .... // something to help you searching your stuff on wp_options table
$name = ..... // whatever identifies your function
$mins = .... // maximum frequency
$trname = substr( $prefix . sprintf( "%u", crc32($name)), 0, 45 );
if( get_transient($trname) )
return "-- not yet";
set_transient( $trname, date('c'), $mins*60 );
// your program ....


Hello,

I have a server with lot of WordPress websites. I often get such notification emails.

Few things I have experimented are:

1. Sometimes this is caused due to plugins. So make sure to disable all plugins and then enable each one every day.
2. If the site has lot of posts and some buggy sitemap generator plugin or some backup plugin, then this can also cause the issue.
3. I disabled WP-Cron from the functions.php file. I then setup a CRON using the hosting’s control panel (in my case Cpanel) and setup a cron job every minute. (+1 to @mrarrow)

For WordPress, always make sure to have a cache plugin. It reduced lot of load. Try reducing the number of queries in the themes too. It has a big impact in overall speed.