Recently I’ve had to deal with a strange problem with rake tasks being run using Cron, a UNIX tool for running commands on a scheduled basis. The problem was basically the server being slowly strangled of resources across a forty to fifty minute time period, as each time the rake task was run it would leave an entire bash process sitting there consuming resources. I had assumed that this problem was relating to the rake task exiting in a non- normal fashion - an exception maybe, or just not returning something that bash was requiring to say ‘OK, I can close now’. As it turned out, the solution was even more basic than that. The server is question is a bit of a prototype, as it’s using a system-wide installation of RVM to mange two very different sets of gems. To help integration with Passenger, each project directory has an .rvmrc file that automatically sets the correct Ruby version and Gemset when that directory is entered. RVM has a neat security feature however, that prompts you to view and approve the file before it is executed for the first time - and, you guessed it, this is what was tripping up Cron. What was happening, is that Cron was changing directory to the release path in order to execute the rake task - but not getting as far as actually executing the Rake task. Instead, Cron was being presented with a security warning from RVM, which was very cleverly sitting there waiting for input to approve the file - causing Bash to sit there… for ever. Fortunately, I did find a solution - it is possible to turn this security mechanism file off, to stop it from prompting for approval of the .rvmrc file, by adding a configuration flag to the default rvmrc file in /etc/rvmrc - here’s the configuration flag: export rvm_trust_rvmrcs_flag=1 (It goes inside what should be an if block). From now on, when Cron runs the rake tasks, it won’t be presented with this prompt - approval will be assumed. No more server resources limits exceeded alerts!