So remember to move /etc/cron.daily/(find|slocate(.cron)?) back to /etc/cron.weekly (overwriting the orphan) after each upgrade of the parent package.

I would like to add that if you do not move your daily cron jobs to weekly as mentioned, or delete them, that you at least “randomize” the times that your daily cron jobs run. This is probably the best way to solve this problem as it allows you to install services as normal and not worry about whether they put cron jobs in daily or weekly, and yet help prevent huge loads on the Linode host at specific times. To do this, simply edit your /etc/crontab file, under the # run-parts entry.

Here is an example section from an /etc/crontab file:

[code]
# run-parts
01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
[/code]

These indicate that cron.hourly jobs run at 1 minute past the hour, cron.daily jobs run at 4:02 am every day, cron.weekly jobs run at 4:22 am every Monday, and cron.monthly jobs run at 4:42 am on the first day of each month.

An example random change would be:

[code]
# run-parts
16 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
45 6 * * 2 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
55 6 3 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
[/code]

This moves the hourly jobs to the 16th minute of every hour, dailies to 6:25 am, weeklies to Wednesday at 6:45 am, and monthlies to 6:55 on the third day of each month.

If we all stagger our times randomly like this, we can go a long way towards eliminating some common performance bottlenecks on Linodes.

Thanks!