Tips : When Cron Jobs Do Not Complete And Cron Jobs Tips

Cron jobs are an essential part of most Drupal installations. Cron jobs take care of Drupal maintenance, synchronization, pinging, spam and other important aspects. Every module implements it own cron hook and cron goes and executes the function. It sometimes happens that the cron jobs you’re running fail and you have no idea how. All you get is a blank : "Last cron job did not complete". What should you do?

Usually, it’s a problem with on the modules you recently installed. Most of the time, it’s also accompanied by another PHP error before or after. It’s best to get a long look at the error log, and see whether anything’s wrong. If there are errors, look them up on the Drupal.org site, and if one of the modules is causing it - upgrade it, or report the problem to the development team.

There are many things you can do to debug this problem, but I was looking for an easy solution for one of my not-so-techie colleague.

First, take a look at CronPlus:

CronPlus is meant to relieve application programmers of the need to reinvent the same old wheel of filtering down the Drupal cron calls — which can happen at any interval chosen by the installer — into real-world (approximate) time intervals. CronPlus provides an approximation at each interval. It does not claim, nor even attempt, to be accurate enough for precise applications such as month-end financial processing or real-time control. Instead, it is meant for duties such as routine log cleanup, updating data from external sources, pushing data to other systems, and similar things which require only an approximate time base.

Looking into this issue I came across those two interesting tips. [..]

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Courtesy : Filination.com