Question about CPU and client crontabs

[casey]

I have a client who is running a perl script every 15 minutes. It eats up 50-70% of the cpu for a moment and then quits. I have PRM from RFX Networks installed, so sometimes it gets killed by PRM.

What I'm wondering is if I need to prohibit the guy from running this script or not. The loads seem fine and never go above 1.0 on this server. It doesn't run constantly, so where do I draw the line? At what point is it going to affect the other clients?

[chirpy]

Do you know what the script is doing?

Personally, we don't allow user crontabs, they have to ask first and justify them to us. If we run them, then my rule of thumb is whether it affects me when I'm on the server at the shell. If things slow down for me, the job has to go. You also have to bear in mind how many more accounts you want to put on the server and whether the load added by the script could affect that.

[casey]

From what I can tell it's updating news items on his website. The thing is, he's running it on my server but displaying the information on a separate server.

[chirpy]

Hmmm, so probably taking advantage of the fact that you allow CRON jobs, but the other server doesn't? Not sure about the ethics of that

[PWSowner]

From what I can tell it's updating news items on his website. The thing is, he's running it on my server but displaying the information on a separate server.

I wouldn't allow that on my server.

They're using you to do what the others won't allow.

It does all depend on how much you want to put on your server.

[casey]

He is using my cheapest plan...and paying monthly...

[PWSowner]

Reminds me of a client I had last year. He signed up for my 10M package, used almost no space, no bandwidth, yet my server was crashing after he signed up. Turned out, all he was doing was using a cron job 4 times/day to get that Yahoo/dmoz domain list. The script was using bandwidth as root.

The script even had a setting to limit how much power to use and he had it set to a figure that is specified for a full server.

I'd give the guy 48 hours notice.

[casey]

I guess I'm just too nice. Thanks guys, for opening my eyes. I'll delete the cronjob and tell him to cancel his account if he's only going to use my server for cronjobs.

[casey]

He cancelled his account. He was only using me for my cpu.

[chirpy]

lusers, all they want you for is your cpu cycles

[SarcNBit]

He cancelled his account. He was only using me for my cpu.

I'm sure he will end up hosting with chadi soon

Seriouly though, you should strongly consider adding verbage to your AUP that prohibits clients from running scripts that are either called by or redirect their output to another server.

[casey]

Seriouly though, you should strongly consider adding verbage to your AUP that prohibits clients from running scripts that are either called by or redirect their output to another server.

Yeah, now I'm going to have to. I guess I've just been lucky so far.