James, The "header" I put in all my crontab files is this: # MIN HOUR DAY MONTH DAYOFWEEK COMMAND
It helps remind me of what those columns mean. So, to use your files: # MIN HOUR DAY MONTH DAYOFWEEK COMMAND 0 0 * * * root webalizer (You can't have leading blanks on the crontab entries, so it looks a little strange, but still better than guessing.) This says that at 0:00 every day of the week, every day of the month, every month of the year, run webalizer. Webalizer is somewhat CPU intensive (hah!), so this could be part of what your capacity guys are seeing, but the times don't match up. In fact, I don't see anything in your entries that would start at 01:00. So, you need to check your /etc/cron.* directories to see what's in there. If it's only happening on Monday's, I would look in /etc/cron.weekly for starters. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: James Melin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 10:58 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Interpreting a crontab file My Workload management colleagues are complaining that on Mondays, my Linux LPAR eats an average of 20% of the CPU about 1-2 AM for an hour or so. Mostly it is just hovering g at 1.5-2.9 % I was wondering if a weekly cleanup/webalizer thingy could be the culprit. This is in my /etc/crontab. I'm having trouble figuring out what the first set is, as it seems to be default or built by something that was installed. I don't do any faxes with this LPAR. The second set is fairly clear = just wondering mostly on this stuff what the 0 0 and * * * means. The only thing I ever asked cron to set up was webalizer, which I suspect as the culprit for the CPU use on Mondays, but that's just a gut feeling. SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin MAILTO=root #-* * * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/atrun && /usr/sbin/atrun 0 21 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/faxqclean && /usr/sbin/faxqclean 5 22 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/texpire && /usr/sbin/texpire 25 23 * * * root test -e /usr/sbin/faxcron && sh /usr/sbin/faxcron | mail FaxMaster # # check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly # -*/15 * * * * root test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons 0 0 * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily 0 0 * * 6 root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly 0 0 1 * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly 0 0 * * * root webalizer
