Thank you Steve. Your suggestion proved to be right on the nail.I'd disable the digest extension at this time also.
Before disabling Digests I set cron_lock to 0 and manually ran the command in my cron job. This time it produced an error 'Unable to find template "digests_html.txt"' abou which much has been written in Discussion/Support posts and FAQs for the Digests extension. This epic thread https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... 31#p822631 in particular pretty much exactly describes the issue I have.
With Digests disabled all other queued tasks are now executing when scheduled.
So now I just have to work my way through the possible causes of the problem with Digests which as far as I can make out include:
"Rogue" HTML tags
Spam blocking by the hosting provider (a strong candidate as I know they have been tightening their controls on outgoing spam recently)
PHP version requirements (seems unlikely because it was running fine on 8.2 and my hosting provider changing it to 7.4 made no difference)
Digests Load Balancing (also seems unlikely - forum is new and has very few active users ( < 2 posts/day) and only 5 are using Digests)
Something to do with EXPORT PATH (no idea what this is and how it might relate to the problem but it does seem to have been the solution in the above-referenced epic thread)
So I have some leads to follow-up and will post here how it all turns out. Till then, this issue has raised a question in my mind - is there any documented description of the implementation of cron tasks in phpBB? e.g. how tasks get queued in phpBB, what order they are processed in if several tasks are ready to be run, how the cron locking/unlocking works etc.
To all who have helped me get to this point "Thank you". I'd describe myself as semi-technical with almost zero knowledge of Linux so I really appreciate the help of the community,
Statistics: Posted by AndySt — Tue Dec 31, 2024 6:45 pm