Posted by Gordon Burditt on 03/02/07 23:47

>I've got a script which writes my blog's RSS feed (rather than dynamically
>generating it each time it is requested), and I'm not sure whether I should
>lock the file while I'm writing it. Truth is, the only way this script
>runs is through cron anyway, and I recently read that "Other processes can
>modify or delete a PHP-locked file if permissions allow." which seems to be
>a waste of time, anyway.
>
>Can someone shed light on this?

Always be prepared to deal with problems with slow cron jobs. If
you run it every 6 hours and it sends an email, be prepared to deal
with what happens if sending an email takes 13 hours (perhaps a
NFS-mounted volume went offline). The solution is NOT to stack up
more processes indefinitely.

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