Scheduling Cron

Request Type:

General Assistance

Forums:

Author:

Alina Nevins

Issue/Request:

I need Cron to run hourly in order to import an RSS feed. The feed is set up successfully using Aggregator, and manually updating items works just fine. The problem is that when trying to configure Cron to run more frequently on https://canvas.yale.edu/admin/config/system/cron, it doesn’t let me select anything other than ‘Never’. After selecting some other option and clicking Save, it says ‘The configuration options have been saved.’ but the dropdown reverts back to ‘Never’.

I tried installing the Elysia Cron module to configure just the Aggregator update task to run hourly, but it still doesn’t seem to want to do this, it only runs daily so that makes me think it’s still looking at some other setting. I disabled this module so you guys can make sure that’s not the problem.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

Alina Nevins on September 26, 2017:

Hi,

Any updates on this??

Thanks,

Alina

Vincent Massaro on October 2, 2017:

Hi Alina,

We configure a standard cron job to run on the server at 4AM daily and disable the ability to set this from the Drupal UI. The reason for this is it performs poorly and unreliably because it requires an uncached page request in order to trigger the cron run. As for Elysia Cron, it requires its own special configured cron job in order to work, so that’s why it wasn’t working for you. I modified the server cron job to run hourly at 5 minutes past the hour (to not conflict with some other tasks that run on the hour) so this should be all set now.