I've written some JavaScript code which runs under node.js to backup a large (~20 MB) file to an Azure blob. This works when run from a bash shell, but fails with the following error when run as a cron job (run as root in both contexts):
FATAL ERROR: v8::Context::New() V8 is no longer usable
Presumably this means that it runs out of heap space, but where is the limit set for cron jobs?
(This is on a 64-bit RHEL 6.2 server, with 8GB RAM and 426 GB free disk space. Node.js is version 0.8.1 and Azure is from the file azure-2012-06.tar.gz.)
Thanks Keith
When you say large do you really mean ~20MB as large file? How long does your cron job runs before return OOM? Also when you run cron job have you checked the memory usage to verify the actual usage to verify if that is the cause.
About your memory/heap limit in cron job, cron just act as job scheduling engine so node.js still uses its own memory/heap setting, this should not be specific to cron scheduler. If you want to change/modify V8 memory you can use --max-old-space-size option to boost it to higher value.
I am interested to see how do you run your node.js code as cron job. There is some possibility that the way you are writing cron job, you are consuming lots of memory while making call to Azure Storage.