I feel like having cron, by default, lock out the next iteration of a program or at least some kind of spawn limit would be ideal.<p>I see this a LOT with wordpress & PHP "developers" deployed on shared hosting (where they often don't observe the runtime and such of these things). They end up having one script step over the next and the next and eventually combined they are generating so much load on the database or some other service that none of them ever finish. Fun fun...<p>I wonder if systemd timers can do that?