As of about a week ago, my cron daemon refuses to stay running. I'm using Debian 6 x64 on an OpenVZ virtual machine. Running something like pgrep cron shows that the daemon isn't running. I start the service with service cron start or /etc/init.d/cron start and it launches, but it disappears from the running process list after a few minutes (varying anywhere between 1 - 30 minutes before the process is killed again).

Using strace -f service cron start, I can see that the process is being killed for some reason:

nanosleep({60, 0},  <unfinished ...>
+++ killed by SIGKILL +++

There's nothing relevant in /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, /var/log/auth.log, or /var/log/kern.log to explain why the the process is dying. The system has at least 800 MB of free memory, and cat /proc/loadavg returns 0.22 0.13 0.04 so resources shouldn't be the issue. With cron running, free -m reports:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1024        211        812          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:        211        812
Swap:            0          0          0

I also tried removing and reinstalling the cron package using apt-get.

Update: I initially thought the problem was a resource issues. I erased my entire VPS and started from a fresh Debian image. There is now nothing else running on the system, but even from a clean install my cron daemon is still being killed at random.

What else should I check? How do I find out what's killing my crond?