[kh99]

I figured it was too soon to be sure what's causing the excess cpu time, but I think there are scheduled tasks that run every hour, so I think there should be something in the file after an hour or else there's a problem.

One thought I had: do you have a mod to backup the database via scheduled task? That seems like something that could potentially cause problems.

I also noticed that cron.php calls set_time_limit(0) at the beginning, so those scripts won't time out. But it seems like you could pick some reasonable upper limit and set that instead of having no limit. Of course it won't tell you what the problem is (which would be nice to know because it might be something important), but it would at least limit the cpu usage.