29 June 2014, 19:11

Hi,

Cron job is set to run every five minutes. Although, notifications for forum postings are not sent out until 7.5 hours after the posting. Is there a bug that causes this? Is there a way to configure/tweak it? We use Mahara version 1.7.2.

BR / Jonas

29 June 2014, 19:23

And just to clarify, the Cron job runs correctly every five minutes, BUT Mahara does not seem to signal that it is ok to include the sending of the Froum notifications until 7,5 hrs after the actual posting.

29 June 2014, 20:39

29 June 2014, 20:41

Hi Dajan, 15 minutes (and I changed it now to 10, but that will of course not resolve the issue).

30 June 2014, 21:42

Hi Jonas,

Do you see any improvement? I know that I needed to specifically save this forum delay notification setting for it to take effect. This might be fixed in 1.9, but most likely still be the case in earlier versions.

If you still don't see any improvement: Can you please check your cron log and see if there are any errors? What do you see on the admin home page in Mahara? Does it say that the cron is running or does it say that it is not running (i.e. also means that it's only running partially)?

Cheers

Kristina

30 June 2014, 23:01

HI and thanks Kristina!

1. Admin home page: Cron is running

2. Cron logs - no errors. It runs correctly.

Still the 7.5 hrs delay in the delivery of the forum notifications.

Cheers, Jonas

01 July 2014, 10:50

Hi Jonas,

I have some questions to clear the context.

Did the issue happen before?

Do only forum notifications have long delay? How about Feedback notifications?

Did you have some special settings in your config.h?

Can you provide some latest info in your cron log?

Cheers,

Son Nguyen

01 July 2014, 13:21

Hm, 7.5 hours, that is strange. The nitty-gritty of how forum posts go out, includes a few different steps, and two runs of the cron job.

1. User creates a forum post

2. We wait for the forum plugin's "post delay" setting to elapse. (You mentioned below that yours is set to 15 minutes). During this period the post can still be edited by the user.

3. Once the post delay has elapsed, the next time the "interaction_forum_new_post" cron task runs, we queue up the notification about the new post. This task runs once every 30 minutes.

4. Once the notification has been queued, it gets handled by the "activity_process_queue" cron task, which runs every 5 minutes. This task sends out the emails (or sends notifications directly to the user's inbox, depending on their account settings).

So normally, if your cron is running regularly, the maximum delay should be (post delay) + 30 minutes + 5 minutes.

In addition to what Son asked, I'd recommend checking the following things:

A. Is it a time zone problem? There can be problems if the web server and the database think they're in different time zones. Have you seen any other incorrect dates/times on your site? Is your web server and/or database server located in a time zone that is 7 or 7.5 hours off from UTC?

B. Does your "post delay" actually last only 15 minutes? If you create a forum post, are you blocked from editing 16 minutes later?

C. Do your logs show that your cron is successfully running every 5 minutes?

D. Have you changed the scheduling of the "interaction_forum_new_post" or "activity_process_queue" cron tasks in your database? The schedule for these is stored in the table "interaction_cron" and "cron" respectively.

Cheers,

Aaron