brianluau

For the past few weeks, we have been using a Cron job to run a PHP script twice a week and backup a mysql database.
We followed this guide: Want to Backup your MySQL databases automagically? by Sam, and it worked great =)

But sometime in the past few days, the backup just stopped working =(
and we can't find an error log/message anywhere. (before, when there was
an error, the cron manager sent an email of the error, or made a file "error_log")

I think the php script still works fine, because when we move it to our public_html directory and browse to the page, the backup runs fine. Do you have any suggestions how/where we can find an error message? or any ideas what might be wrong =)

Thanks!

PS: the cron job is scheduled on our website (shared hosting plan)
and it is backing up a mysql database on our dedicated (surpass) server.

nathon

Is the cron emailing you that it failed? The cron also might have disappeared and needs to be re-created. Also, be sure you aren't doing a lynx or curl.

Try
/usr/bin/php /home/USERNAME/public_html/filename.php

If you have SSH access you can also try the command above, if it works with SSH it should work via a cron.

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brianluau

Thanks.
We just deleted the cron jobs and re-added them and now they magically work again =P

Also, a question for Surpass: the database we're backing up is about 45 MB so when we first ran the backup script, it would get the error
"PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of _______ bytes exhausted..."
So we used ini_set("memory_limit","96M"); and kept increasing it until the script had enough memory and ran without error.

Is that okay? and what's the max memory_limit we can set?

Thanks again for the help

Roxy

Yes, that is fine. I would set it to:

from this link to our PHP5/MySQL5 Upgrades php.ini: http://surmunity.com/images/thephp5%21/php.ini

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