I have a development Drupal 4.7.3 installed on a Windoze 2.8Ghz with 4GBytes of memory, with Apache Mysql and PHP, and OG and Flexinode modules enabled.

It is stated in the documentation,

"These cron hooks fire after all HTML is returned to the browser, so the user who kicks off the cron jobs should not notice any delay."

Unfortunatley, I am seeing the opposite, when I logon or try to browse my website, and Poormanscron kicks in, it will take until the cron is finished before I get a response, and this could be over 20 seconds.

I have had to disable the module and turn to running the cron manually.

Is there something that I have not configure properly.

Thanking you in anticipation
Stephen

Comments

fgm’s picture

fgm
Primary language French
Location Paris, France
commented
Priority: Critical » Normal
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

If you look at poormanscron code, the cron does indeed fire after the page has been output, being started with hook_exit().

So if you are still having this problem with the current version of drupal (4.7.5 today) and the latest packaged poormanscron (are you using these ?), it might be an other issue, possibly your host using a reverse proxy and not releasing the page until the HTTP connection has been closed (some caching HTTP/1.1 proxies can act like this). Are you hosted, or do you have this problem on a configuration you can control yourself without a proxy between your browser and drupal ?

cburschka’s picture

cburschka
they
commented

I haven't used Poormanscron, but I have seen something similar at my host: Something about the output buffer or the gzipped transmission of pages causes the page not to be sent to my browser until PHP is no longer running.

The flush() function of PHP might help.

In any case, ask your host how to flush PHP output before the script finishes, and they'll probably be able to tell you what settings are preventing it.

spjsche’s picture

spjsche commented

The site is an intranet at work, it does not use proxies, and I have full control over the site.

I have not as yet upgraded to 4.7.5, I am working on moving over to 5.x when it comes out, but there is still no poormanscron for that release so I cannot see if the same thing is happening.

I do know for a fact that on 5.x my cron has been getting stuck as per http://drupal.org/node/106418.

I have moved over to PHP 5.2, but now my test site has gone down, so I need to work on getting that up and running.

Thanks for the reply.

fgm’s picture

fgm
Primary language French
Location Paris, France
commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Active

Poormanscron for 5.0 is here for now.

I have it live on a site with about 30 users, and it doesn't seem to cause problems. You could try to apply it: except for the move from 4.7 to 5.0 conventions, it's still essentially the same code. Beware, though, on 5.0 you can NOT use agressive caching and poormanscron together.

spjsche’s picture

spjsche commented

Excellent, thanks for the pointer.

spjsche’s picture

spjsche commented

I am quite content to close this issue.

Thanks for your time

Stephen

fgm’s picture

fgm
Primary language French
Location Paris, France
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

OK, then.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)