wp-cron.php and zip continue running

Hi Andy,

Those must be zombie processes; if they were actually doing anything, then later UD runs would detect them. (UD checks the file modification times of the zips its working on).

To switch to a different zip engine that doesn’t use external zip binaries, add this to your wp-config.php:

define(‘UPDRAFTPLUS_NO_BINZIP’, true);

For stopping regularly scheduled backups, choose “Manual” from the list of options for backup schedules on the UD settings page.

David

Thanks, David. A bit of a “duh” moment on my part with the “manual” setting. [sigh]

As noted on the UpdraftPlus site, I created a file with the following contents, called runbackup.php on the / of my webserver:

<?php

define('UPDRAFTPLUS_CONSOLELOG', true);
require_once('wp-load.php');
do_action('updraft_backup_all');

?>

When I run it with:
/usr/local/bin/php ~/web/runbackup.php
it seems to still use the “stepped” method. Is there anything that will let it just blast through the whole process, and get it over with?

Hi Andy,

What’s the “stepped” method?

David

The 9 steps that the plugin goes through, which has big pauses in between the steps… My first test run with the above php file took about 3 hours to complete, and that seems a tad ridiculous.

And it still left zombie processes. :-/

If you like, I’ll send you a copy of the logfile…

Hi Andy,

OK – those aren’t “steps”; those are restarts of a job for which the PHP process died. That shouldn’t be able to happen from the command line, unless your server has something that detects and kills off long-running PHP processes. Post the log (e.g. pastebin.com) and I can take a look. Please confirm that it’s a log generated from the shell.

How long it takes is a function of the speed of the webserver and the size of the website. A default WP install on my cheap laptop takes about 4 seconds. So presumably you have a vast amount of data in the WP site.

Are you sure you set UPDRAFTPLUS_NO_BINZIP? Or that the zombie processes you’re seeing aren’t old ones? That settings prevents UD from opening zip as an external binary, so there shouldn’t be any subprocesses to begin with – let alone ones which later become zombies.

David

It ran last night a bit better, I think. I’ve put the logfile here: https://pastebin.com/TR97efmJ

I haven’t yet swapped the zip off the binary – that will be my next step…
That run last night produced the following zombied processes:

[~]# ps -ef | grep USERNAME
USERNAME  21273  5400  0 02:40 ?        00:00:00 crond
USERNAME  21276 21273  0 02:40 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh -c /usr/local/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/runbackup.php >/dev/null 2>&1
USERNAME  21277 21276  0 02:40 ?        00:00:00 /usr/local/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/runbackup.php
USERNAME  21301 21277  0 02:40 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/zip -v -@ /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-content/updraft/backup_2014-03-12-2340_SITE_NAME_REPLACED_440d3520ef60-plugins.zip.tmp
USERNAME  21558 20398  0 02:45 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-cron.php
USERNAME  21563 21558  0 02:45 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/zip -v -@ /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-content/updraft/backup_2014-03-12-2340_SITE_NAME_REPLACED_440d3520ef60-plugins.zip.tmp
kingster 22439 21534  0 08:42 pts/0    00:00:00 grep USERNAME
USERNAME  22534 21622  0 03:00 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-cron.php
USERNAME  22540 22534  0 03:00 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/zip -v -@ /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-content/updraft/backup_2014-03-12-2340_SITE_NAME_REPLACED_440d3520ef60-plugins.zip.tmp
USERNAME  31639 31359  0 03:15 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-cron.php
USERNAME  31645 31639  0 03:15 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/zip -v -@ /home/USERNAME/public_html/wp-content/updraft/backup_2014-03-12-2340_SITE_NAME_REPLACED_440d3520ef60-plugins.zip.tmp

Actually prevented the cron job from “completing”. ??

Yeah… Swapping to the non-binary zip totally made a difference. No zombie processes, and much faster… See the log here: https://pastebin.com/HM3BBr45

Hi Andy,

Great, glad you got it working.

Best wishes,
David

Just to sum up the thread for anyone else… I have UpdraftPlus backing up a somewhat large site (lots of pics!). For some reason, it really didn’t like some of the default settings, and in addition, I didn’t like the lack of control I got with the usage of wp-cron.php. So!

I added the following settings to my wp-config.php just before the “Stop Editing” line:

/**
* Turn off the running of wp-cron.php page based on visits because it sucks
*/
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

/**
*Tell UpdraftPlus to use a non-binary ZIP
*/
define('UPDRAFTPLUS_NO_BINZIP', true);

The first line turns off wp-cron. I call that page with a real cron job every 15 minutes. The second line tells UpdraftPlus to use a non-binary zip tool (maybe embedded in PHP?).

The next thing I did was create a PHP file in my site’s / (root) directory – which is where I run WordPress from. I called the file runbackup.php, with the following contents:

<?php

define('UPDRAFTPLUS_CONSOLELOG', true);
require_once('wp-load.php');
do_action('updraft_backup_all');

?>

Finally, I created two cron jobs. One runs the wp-cron.php via wget, the other runs the backup every night at 2:40AM:

*/15  *  *  *  *  wget -q -O - https://website.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1
40  2  *  *  *  /usr/local/bin/php /home/username/public_html/runbackup.php >/dev/null 2>&1

(obviously, you’ll need to replace the website.com and username).

This makes it so the site backs up quickly, and at a repeatable time every day.