So I'm stuck trying to handle a situation on a GoDaddy hosted account. Everything is wonderful, I'm really 99.9% pleased with the hosting and MySQL capabilities of GoDaddy over the client's previous hosting solution.
However, the 0.1% that is NOT happy, is causing some serious problem. Cron.
I can setup a cron job in the Hosting manager, but when GoDaddy fires off the command, it seems to re-fire the command every second until it gets what it wants or exceeds some retry cap (like 60+ retries apparently). This then seems to "lock" cron.php / the semaphore. But just removing the semaphore variable from the variable table doesn't fix it.
I went through this nice long walkthrough: http://drupal.org/node/360836 and it fixed it. Re-Enabling each module, updating if needed, then running cron.php manually, and then checking the cron entries in the log file - all completed successfully. Like 60+ iterations of re-enabling one or two modules each time. Everything was fine, until I re-enabled the GoDaddy cron.
The first time the GoDaddy cron it calls the cron.php through cURL, BAM it causes problems. I've tried variants of cURL, wGET, through http addresses, through local $HOME paths, everything.
(Supposition) It appears that when the GoDaddy cron fires off, it expects a local response in under 1 second, and retries the command every second for a minute (or longer). I base this on the long cURL retry output e-mail I get sent after a few minutes. I'm supposing that this is causing a problem with the cron.php and variables table. You'd think the semaphore would prevent multiple re-firings, but the ONLY time the cron.php gets "hung" or takes longer than a few seconds to run, is when GoDaddy's cron runs it. Period.
Like I said, I went through 60+ iterations of updating / re-enabling modules / re-running the status report / re-running cron from the admin interface, and re-checking the Log entries (filtered for Cron events), and they all completed fine. Until I re-enabled GoDaddy cron :(
If anyone has any thoughts on this, I appreciate it immensely (Jason, Bronius, Tall David, Efruin, etc...) :)
Thanks