By Patrick Nelson on

We're currently trying a new host - Heart Internet who, by the way, are excellent in every respect (except this one, I suppose).

Basically, I'm having problems running cron. Heart support staff tell me this:

"It is a common misconception that scripts will run on servers which run on other servers as different servers do have different configurations. For example, we run PHP as part of CGI while some run it as a Apache module. Like you have seen from the errors, the problem is occurring from running the scripts which you would need alter. We wouldn't be able to offer coding support as it is beyond the level of support we can offer so you would need debug them with the information provided by the output or notify your developer of these errors."

Can anyone tell me what I need to do to make cron work in these circumstances?

Regards

Patrick

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Probably. What was your cron command and what was the exact error message?

Patrick Nelson’s picture

Patrick Nelson commented

Hi,

Well, Heart Internet offer a facility whereby you can set a scheduled task via their control panel. I've done this and had the output of the script emailed to me. This is the email I receive:

Subject: Cron ulimit -m 100000; nice -- /usr/bin/php -f /home/sites/rodats.com/public_html/cron.php

Message: 

<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  session_start() [<a href='function.session-start'>function.session-start</a>]: Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent in <b>/home/sites/rodats.com/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc</b> on line <b>862</b><br /> <br />
<b>Warning</b>:  session_start() [<a href='function.session-start'>function.session-start</a>]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/sites/rodats.com/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc:862) in <b>/home/sites/rodats.com/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc</b> on line <b>862</b><br /> <br /> <b>Fatal error</b>:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 351200 bytes) in <b>/home/sites/rodats.com/public_html/includes/database.inc</b> on line <b>199</b><br />

This is literally how the email appears - with all the HTML showing.

Would appreciate any help you can offer.

Regards

Patrick Nelson
UnderDesign - View portfolio

styro’s picture

styro commented

http://drupal.org/node/76156

If you host won't let you increase the amount of memory each PHP request can allocate, you'll either need to disable a bunch of modules or find a new host. Every module you install that uses cron will add to the amount of memory that cron.php will need to run. 8MB is generally starting to get a bit on the small site for a lot of Drupal sites these days anyway.

--
Anton
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Patrick Nelson’s picture

Patrick Nelson commented

I can see where it shows that in the error message, but this doesn't make sense. I have a php.ini file in the root of the web directory that looks like this:

max_execution_time = 500
max_input_time = 300
memory_limit = 64M

I'm using this to override the global php.ini file and I'm pretty convinced that it's working because, in another Drupal install that I have with Heart, I had a memory exhausted error when attempting to view admin/build/modules but I uploaded this php.ini file and then was able to view modules just fine.

Or is it that this file will be ignored when calling cron.php?

Regards

Patrick Nelson
UnderDesign - View portfolio

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

I think you are using the wrong cron command.

Drupal's cron.php must be visited by a "browser" program such as wget, lynx, or curl, using a site's URL. It is not intended to be run by php using a file path.

See http://drupal.org/cron

Ask them if they have wget, lynx or curl available.

fxtv’s picture

fxtv commented

You wrote : "Drupal's cron.php must be visited by a "browser" program such as wget..."

Is there a way to run cron.php without wget or lynx ?

Why? because I would like to use pcntl_fork (which is not running under in Apache mode) to speed up the aggregator.module.

FRançois-Xavier

bonaparte’s picture

bonaparte commented

"Is there a way to run cron.php without wget or lynx?"

Yes. Use PHP to call cron.php. http://drupal.org/cron

Sudheer. S
Binary Vibes Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
www.binaryvibes.co.in | www.binaryvibes.in | www.lampcomputing.com | www.sudheer.net

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Quoting from http://drupal.org/cron, near the end:

"Note that it is essential to access cron.php using a browser on the web site's domain; do not run it using command line PHP directly"

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Sorry, I don't know what pcntl_fork is. However, my understanding is that cron.php must not be accessed using its file path, but only using its URL (different for each site if it is a multisite, to update the right database).

kenorb’s picture

kenorb commented

Yes, it's true.
To set cron on HeartInternet is the nightmare.

My advice is to change your hosting provider as fast as you can:
http://drupal.org/hosting
HeartInternet is not good for Drupal websites.
They don't change anything in MySQL configuration and configuration of it is very poor.

Drupal cron doesn't work at all on HeartInternet:
#357578: Nightmare with setting Drupal cron on HeartInternet and other poor hosting plans -drupal.sh / cron.php

businesswebmedia’s picture

businesswebmedia commented

Hello,

I am a HI reseller and simply cannot install drupal,
if you can help me out i will happily pay one of you a token amount if your action can be replicated for the rest of my clients

contact me on smoore@gigaquid.co.uk if you are able to help me, it would be much appreciated

many thanks

Sam Moore