Old issue with "server has gone away for query"?

[Rarst]

I got email from host that they traced (took them what, four months?) issue to several specific accounts exhausting MySQL with excessive wp-cron.php processes.

They don't seem to know or want to figure out cause and those accounts will be shot offline at end of this week unless they fix their issues themselves. Sweet WordPress-specialized support. :)

I wonder why loops happen on few accounts out of whole server... Either they use some crappy plugin (their WP versions are up to date as I checked) or they somehow clash with server configuration.

Anyway I moved my blog to another hosting yesterday. It pains cheapskate me to walk out on free hosting, but by now I was quite willing to pay just to get out of there. :)

[Jeffro]

Hmm, I wonder why this issue has not crept up for me as I'm also on shared hosting with a provider that prides themselves on working with WordPress quite well.

[Otto]

If it's cron problems, check to see what's running there with this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-crontrol/

I use it every so often for development. Handy.

[Rarst]

If it's cron problems, check to see what's running there with this plugin:

As above - it was problems at other blogs. Basically server packed full of WP blogs and cron going out of control on some of them. Not mine so I had no way to look into it.

Something that hoster claiming to specialize in WP should have clue about, but sadly not the case.

[andrea_r]

and cron going out of control on some of them

To me that points to plugin issues though. Get a badly coded plugin messing with cron and.. yeah... well, you know..

[Rarst]

@andrea_r

What can plugin really do with cron? Default schedules don't fire that often. Creating shorter custom schedules would have swamped server continuously instead of random spikes.

Anyway from what I googled up wp-cron seems like recipe for disaster in many ways. :)

[Otto]

What can plugin really do with cron? Default schedules don't fire that often. Creating shorter custom schedules would have swamped server continuously instead of random spikes.

Badly written plugin can create thousands of scheduled jobs by accident, by scheduling itself over and over again. Plugin needs to manage its jobs properly and to remove them on uninstall or deactivation as well. It can be tricky to get it right.

Anyway from what I googled up wp-cron seems like recipe for disaster in many ways. :)

wp-cron has had it's share of problems, but on the whole it works okay. It's just when you have stuff messing with it that it can freak out your site. Some sanity checks would help it, I think, but they'd just create more burdens on plugin programmers.