Cron jobs too heavy for ordinary systems (system completely unusable for a while)

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

> vincenzo at frattaglia:~$ free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers
> cached
> Mem:       1017884     987568      30316          0      16544
> 651836
> -/+ buffers/cache:     319188     698696
> Swap:      1887596    1884040       3556
>
>
> So yes, an hurricane has passed in my poor 1gb of memory, leaving almost
> 2gb of trash in my swap partition.
>
>   

You might have a memory leak that is causing this.

Please use top and find out what process or processes is/are taking up 
so much memory.