b queue max run limit reached

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <1006 at mgse.UUCP> by marks at mgse.UUCP (Mark Seiffert):
+---------------
| I am batching some stuff up to be done and i keep getting the message
| 
| ! b queue max run limit reached Fri Oct  6 15:11:14 CDT 1989
| ! rescheduling at job Fri Oct  6 15:11:14 CDT 1989
| 
| These messages keep appearing on tty01 and are annoying. Right now there
| are two at jobs running and two more pending. Is there anyway to increase
| the number of batched jobs? Is there any way to stop the message on the
| console? I don't mind that the job is being rescheduled, it is just a little
| hard to use tty01.
+---------------

It looks like cron opens /dev/console to write its messages; in other words,
you're stuck with them.  (Change /dev/console and you get an unusable system,
except that the next reboot will put it back the way it was.)  You might use a
binary patcher or Gnumacs to edit /etc/cron and change /dev/console to
something else, though.

Queue limits:  Check out /usr/lib/cron/queuedefs.  Here's ours (standard):

	a.4j1n
	b.2j2n90w

This is in the format "<queue>.<parms>", where <parms> is one or more of:

	<nn>j	number of concurrent jobs
	<nn>n	amount to "nice" jobs (see nice(C))
	<nn>w	timw to wait between jobs (? -- I think)

There may be other options, but queuedefs isn't documented and we don't have a
source license.

Anyway, just up the number before the "j" on the "b" line.

In case you're interested, there are three standard queues:

	a	standard "at" queue
	b	"batch" queue ("batch" is just "at -qb")
	c	"cron" queue -- don't touch it!!!

Other queues can be created and used; "at -qX" places an "at" job on queue X.
As far as I can tell, you can specify a time to execute unless the "w" option
is on the queue, in which case "at" sets the time itself as <nn> seconds from
submission time.  This facility makes it easy to create multiple "at-like" and
"batch-like" queues, with different priorities, etc.  Pity it's not documented.
(BTW, this seems to be the standard SVR2 cron, so anyone with SVR2 or later
can make use of this feature.)

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery at NCoast.ORG
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