I have a cronjob that is scheduled hourly to execute a php file. It normally works without issue but sometimes it skips hours randomly. This morning it did this:
[03-Aug-2015 00:00:02 America/Denver] runHourly triggered
[03-Aug-2015 01:00:03 America/Denver] runHourly triggered
[03-Aug-2015 02:00:02 America/Denver] runHourly triggered
[03-Aug-2015 05:02:25 America/Denver] runHourly triggered
It's never skipped 3 hours in a row before...
I don't have access to check any cronjob logs because I'm using my shared hosting panel to setup the job.
I've entered a support ticket for the issue but is there something else I could do in order to ensure it's run every hour? Are there alternatives to cronjobs? What would cause this?
I too have faced this type of problem before. The best solution is, to make another cron job.
1). When you hourly cron job executes, make it such that it inserts a row in a table. (Make a table which will monitor cron)
2). Make another cron job. Run it after 10 minutes of the original cron job. So suppose your main job runs at the start of every hour, make this second cron job run at +10 minutes. So cron job 1 runs at 00:00 and cron job 2 runs at 00:10. This second cron job checks for the row which should've been made by the original cron job, if the index is not there, run the original file again, and if it exists, delete that record (this record now become useless)