i have several cron jobs running on an ubuntu machine. each one does some pretty heavy load stuff. The cron jobs are parsing files and the bigger the file the longer it takes them to parse it. The strange thing is that if i make the files too big ( like 30mb) the script kind of hangs. It starts processing them really enthusiastically but after some time (something like 5-10 minutes) the cpu usage of the process drops a lot and it gets into some "zombie" state. If prior to this the process in htop was using 70-80% of the CPU then after this drop occurs it slows down to something like 5-10%. the load average drops down as well. The status of the processes sometimes changes to D in htop, which AFAIR stands for zombie. Today i noticed the same behavior of processes of mysql when executing heavy queries (a query took something like 4 hours to execute). the cron jobs are mostly php and during their processing most of the CPU eats the php process and not mysql. so i think the issue is not with a specific language/program but with the way the processes are "managed".

The only other place i've seen similar behavior was on my Amazon EC2 micro instance when after some aggressive use of CPU the CPU quota was taking effect and everything was slowing down dramatically.

This is a dedicated machine running ubuntu. what may be the cause?