CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

ERROR: Unknown error in obtaining lock

This means that the CiviMail cronjob had some problems with obtaining lock; can you check whether the user that runs the cronjob has proper permissions to create a file named .civicrm_cronjob.lck in CiviCRM’s upload dir?

The e-mails are going out, though.

Hm, are you sure? By looking at the cronjob file, that error should trigger an immediate exit() instead of a processQueue() call.

Hm, so the lock got obtained and the mailing got send. Are you sure the cronjob ran only once?

This is very strange; the cronjob should either send mail or throw the error, but not both. I’m affraid you’ll have to create a test mailing and trace what it exactly does line-by-line.

Well, the send/delivery/tracking is external with regards to the cronjob, so if you’re sure the mails do get sent then you don’t have to worry too much about the error (although I’m very curious how you can get that error and trigger the sending at the same time, as there’s a exit() call between them in the cronjob script).

The processQueue() call that actually sends the mail (from the point of view of the script) is atomic, so if somethings does get sent, then it can’t be affected by the lock error.