[plug] Lots of /USR/SBIN/CRON processes

[Patrick Coleman]

Hi,

Recently I've noticed that there are lots of cron processes hanging
around. Heres a sample output of ps -H afx:

 1368 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
 1483 ?        S      0:00  \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
 1485 ?        Ss     0:00  |   \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
 1491 ?        S      0:00  \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
 1493 ?        Ss     0:00  |   \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
 1497 ?        S      0:00  \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
 1499 ?        Ss     0:00  |   \_ /USR/SBIN/CRON
...

There are about 10 processes there at the moment, and the system was
booted about 30 minutes ago. These processes appear to sit there
indefinately. I've seen it where there are literally pagefulls of
entries after the system had been running for a while.

This is debian stable.

I'm pretty sure the system never used to do this. I had some nasty
corruption with reiserfs recently (such that the kernel was getting
into a deadlock and leaving the system completely unusable), but I
created another partition, formatted with ext3, copied everything
across and rebooted into the new partition. I think this would have
started happening about the same time as the corruption.

I have tried reinstalling cron (apt-get install --reinstall cron) on
the new ext3 system.

Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this? Any
suggestions would be very welcome.

Cheers,

Patrick