Cron job is stuck in “running” status

This article provides a solution for when Adobe Commerce cron jobs do not finish executing and persist in a running status, which prevents other cron jobs from running. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as network issues, application crashes, redeployment issues.

Affected products and versions

Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure, all versions

Symptom

Symptoms of cron jobs that must be reset include:

  • Large quantity of jobs appear in the cron_schedule queue
  • Site performance starts to degrade
  • Jobs fail to execute on schedule

Solution

WARNING

Running this command without the --job-code option resets all cron jobs, including those currently running, so we recommend using it only in exceptional cases, such as after you have verified that all cron jobs must be reset. Re-deployment runs this command by default to reset cron jobs, so they recover appropriately after the environment is back up. Avoid using this solution when indexers are running.

To resolve this issue, you must reset the cron job(s) using the cron:unlock command. This command changes the status of the cron job in the database, ending the job forcefully to allow other scheduled jobs to continue.

  1. Open a terminal and use your SSH keys to connect to the affected environment.
  2. Get the MySQL database credentials: shell echo $MAGENTO_CLOUD_RELATIONSHIPS | base64 -d | json_pp
  3. Connect to the database using mysql : shell mysql -hdatabase.internal -uuser -ppassword main
  4. Select the main database: shell use main
  5. Find all running cron jobs: shell SELECT * FROM cron_schedule WHERE status = 'running';
  6. Copy the job_code of any job running longer than usual.
  7. Use the schedule IDs from the previous step to unlock specific cron jobs: shell ./vendor/bin/ece-tools cron:unlock --job-code=<job_code_1> [... --job-code=<job_code_x>]

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