I installed Poormanscron the other day in the hope of eliminating the need to run CRON manually.
It had been installed for several days, but when I checked the site status this morning, CRON had not been run as I noticed a request to run it manually again.

The module was installed properly, but aside from enabling it, I don't understand what else was needed.
In any event, it didn't seem to work.

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

why not set up a cronjob on your server to run cron.php at regular intervals and by pass the resources poormans cron is using ?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

VeryMisunderstood,

I'd be happy to set up a cron to run periodically, but I haven't the foggiest idea as to how.

vm’s picture

vm commented

typically done in your hosts control panel. Host documentation or the like will light the way.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I checked the cPanel on the hosting service and set up a CRON job to execute cron.php
It didn't work and generated a bunch of errors. So I submitted a help request to the hosting service.
They said that they'd increased the amount of ram in the PHP.INI file to 64 meg and that it should work.

I tried it again - still no luck.

Regardless what I try the cron.php file will not execute unless I do it manually.
I'm wondering - when I run the cron job manually I'm logged in as the administrator of the Drupal site.
Is this the problem? When the job is run by the hosting service as a CRON job, I'm logged out of the Drupal site.

I've gone back to running cron manually since nothing I've tried has worked.

vm’s picture

vm commented

you don't need to be logged in for the server to run the cronjob. Apache is running it so it will run whether you are logged into drupal or not. Asking your host why the cronjobs aren't working would provide more fruit. It's a standard practice these days to run a cronjob in apache to do these types of tasks and if the panel provides a method to do so, then the host allows this to be done and should offer support on such a feature.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I'll give it another shot.
I sent them a copy of the error message the other day and that resulted in their responding with increasing the memory limit in the PHP.ini file.

However, I still get errors.
One thing I'm curious about is if the cron.php file is referencing any other files this may be the problem as the path to files is different when running a cron job - different than from a browser.

Has anyone else actually had experience in running the "cron.php" file in Drupal on a scheduled basis?
An example would be very helpful.

Thanks!

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

My hosting service responded and said that they'd modified the cron job command line.
The format is very similar to the following and it's running perfectly. I run it once a day using the CRON.PHP maintenance script from Drupal.

45 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q http://example.com/cron.php

vm’s picture

vm commented
Category: bug » support
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)