What Should I Do If a Cron Job Cannot Be Restarted After Being Stopped for a Period of Time?

When a cron job is paused mid-execution and later resumed, the controller checks the number of missed scheduling times between the last scheduled time and the current time. If this number exceeds 100, the controller will not start the job and logs the error. For details, see CronJob limitations.

Cannot determine if job needs to be started. Too many missed start time (> 100). Set or decrease .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds or check clock skew.

For example, assume that a cron job is set to create a job every minute from 08:30:00 and the startingDeadlineSeconds field is not set. If the cron job controller stops running from 08:29:00 to 10:21:00, the job will not be started because the time difference between 08:29:00 and 10:21:00. 00 exceeds 100 minutes, that is, the number of missed scheduling times exceeds 100 (in the example, a scheduling period is 1 minute).

If the startingDeadlineSeconds field is set, the controller calculates the number of missed jobs in the last x seconds (x indicates the value of startingDeadlineSeconds). For example, if startingDeadlineSeconds is set to 200, the controller counts the number of jobs missed in the last 200 seconds. In this case, if the cron job controller stops running from 08:29:00 to 10:21:00, the job will start again at 10:22:00, because only three scheduling requests are missed in the last 200 seconds (in the example, one scheduling period is 1 minute).

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  startingDeadlineSeconds: 200
  schedule: "* * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox:1.28
            imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
            command:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello
          restartPolicy: OnFailure