There are many CRON processes in the list, is this normal?

Question

linux

Previously, somehow I did not pay attention, but recently I sorted the processes by name and saw a strange picture. For example, CRON'a 42 pieces, somehow too much =). Is it normal? Or is it 1 process and I'm just not looking at it that way? I was guided by PID, it is different.

Or here is the file /root/backup/do-backup.sh in the cron once with a start at 0 hours. And on the screen below there are several of them.

The task looks like this:
* 0 * * * /root/backup/do-backup.sh >> /root/backup/log.log 2>&1

Answer 1

Is it normal for /USR/SBIN/CRON to be capitalized? In Unixes, the case of letters matters. Is it a crown???

Answer 2

Servers periodically crashed due to such a problem with crowns in status D. Googling English-language resources led to finding this: "I have seen this happen before, it was always associated with a developing disk or disk controller fault. Check your hardware fault log too."
In this state, the server generally behaved strangely, attempts to write something to disk hang processes, and then the entire system (although reading worked out). On my servers, I updated the kernel to the latest, other strange problems were solved along the way. While I'm watching.

Answer 3

Most likely, do-backup.sh runs too long, or even hangs. To make sure that this is the case, and not a feature of the script that creates a bunch of forks, you can use ps -o pid,cmd,lstart -p $PID1,$PID2,...
the PID of all processes - it will show the time when which one of them was launched.

Answer 4

Show the crontab itself or the file where the cron tasks are registered. Maybe somewhere in the notation they made a mistake and they often run for you.
You can also check by the logs, there will be messages at what time what tasks are running.
I also recommend paying attention to the load on the disk. In your screenshots, half of the processes are in state D. This means that the disk is currently unable to cope and makes the processes wait.