Cron Maintenance

You may have noticed that some of your downtime activities inexplicably completed this morning. That's because I manually advanced downtime to make up for four days this week during which it had stalled. The short explanation is that it was an unexpected consequence of the changeover that should now be fixed. The long explanation is below for my own future reference and in case anyone's curious (or masochistic) enough to care.

Following the upgrade, the search index for the site had to be regenerated. Normally, this isn't a problem, since it indexes 200 nodes on every cron run until the index is complete. However, the script was encountering errors on some older pages with PHP code that was no longer valid (curse the brigands who took away db_num_rows() in Drupal 6). Apparently other cron related tasks, like the downtime cron, were later in the execution cycle and thus weren't getting processed. I fixed the offending pages, reran the cron a few dozen times to complete the search index, and now everything seems to be working fine again.