When cron fails it leaves behind a semaphore flag in the variables table of the database which it does not clean up. Then you cannot again run cron until you delete the semaphore from the database. At very minimum there should be a link somewhere to remove this as a workaround.

When cron fails this badly it also does not leave an entry in the log. So cron fails, and I have no idea why, and I have to edit variables.

This has been happening to me about one day in three.

I'd love to provide more debugging information but drupal doesn't provide any to me.

Comments

dddave’s picture

dddave commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Yeah, this is a very annoying but well known problem. Search for cron semaphore and you get tons of issues. Especially for new and/or inexperienced users this can be a major WTF problem. I hope and guess that this is fixed in D7 but there is no hope for D6. :(