Magento 1.9 cron hanging and missing other jobs

Question

I am using Magento 1.9 Cron is working properly, I can tail the cron and see it is running each minute

[root@ip]# tail -f /var/log/cron
Jan 23 12:31:01 ip-172-30-0-248 CROND[30511]: (root) CMD (/bin/sh /var/www/vhosts/html/cron.sh)
Jan 23 12:32:01 ip-172-30-0-248 CROND[30523]: (root) CMD (/bin/sh /var/www/vhosts/html/cron.sh)
Jan 23 12:33:01 ip-172-30-0-248 CROND[30580]: (root) CMD (/bin/sh /var/www/vhosts/html/cron.sh)

The problem is that we noticed that sometimes our transaction emails where not sending so I installed AOE scheduler and I can see that it is hanging on a feed export module.

At this point I would normally NOT post here because it seems it is a third party module until I had another client with a completely different long running cron that is doing the same thing on a different server and NOT the same module.

Is there way to multi thread cron jobs so it don't just run one at a time?

Answer 1

I don't know how to make crontab multithreaded. It does fork each process already but the problem is that it will run the crons one at a time. I think you'd need to build it into the php application itself. I read the EE has some more advanced cron logic built into it but I haven't done anything with it yet.

On the extension that's exporting the hanging product feed, try removing the crontab entries from its config.xml. Add an external php file with app/Mage.php that only runs the export function and set it up on its own cron entry. At least it would remove the export feed bottleneck from the main cron.