Hi, > On 2 Nov 2026, at 11:25, Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]> wrote: > > Embedded systems using cron(8) are starting to cause macroscopic > effects at the top of the minute: > > https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2026/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved > > That indicates that we should add jitter to cron(8). > > I can see three ways to do it: > > A) By default cron(8) waits [0...N] seconds before executing commands. > This can be disabled with a command line option. > For a number of reasons which we can hash later, I suggest N=30 > > B) Same as A), but the command line option enables jitter. > > C) Same as A), but with additional crontab(5) syntax to say "dont > jitter this particular entry". > > I would argue that A is the proper choice. > > Comments ?
I’d vote for C; you don’t want people like me turning the jitter off globally because one entry is time-critical. > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 > [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 > FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. > -- Bob Bishop [email protected]
