large files cause cron to get stuck
seanburlington - June 5, 2008 - 16:37
| Project: | API |
| Version: | 5.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | Code |
| Category: | bug report |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | by design |
Jump to:
Description
if there are any large files in the directory being searched by API it can crash and leave cron in a stuck state
I have some text files ~300Mb that cause problems.
Cron getting stuck is pretty bad :-(
Possibile solutions
1) check file size before parsing (maybe performance problem)
2) provide settings to exclude some directories
I'll look into this some more but wanted to post the report before I forget about the problem (again)

#1
Increase your PHP memory limit. You can call cron via drush or drupal.sh so it uses a CLI-specific memory limit and leaves the web memory limit the same. There is a separate issue for excluding directories, http://drupal.org/node/406382.
#2
Hi Drumm,
I understand that there are workarounds for this - and I'm not suggesting that the api module be modified to be able to handle large files.
This report just points out that in this circumstance api module causes cron to become permanently stuck - no further cron jobs run until the database is manually adjusted.
This seems like a bug to me - maybe it's in core rather than api - either way the failure could be more graceful.