splaytime not honoured?

[khalid . sattar]

We run cfengine twice an hour, once via cron on the hour using  cfexecd -F 
and also via the daemon mode.  The scheduler has been changed with 

        schedule = ( Min30_35 )

All this work fine except that the runs that happen from cron seems to (I 
believe) create a heavy load in our policyhost (a sparc 20) which then 
results in many error messages like

ace: Key-authentication for ace.cam.harlequin.co.uk failed
ace: Unable to establish connection with fin.cam.harlequin.co.uk

(ace is the client, fin is the policyhost).

Running this manually usually work fine unless it happens to be in the 1st 
few mins past the hour. and we have noticed that we never see such 
messages  around 2nd run (ie 30-35 mins run past the hour) which is 
started from cfexecd in daemon mode.

This lead me to think that the splaytime is not being honoured when 
cfexecd is executed with -F, therefore to all connections are coming in at 
once which is too much for the policyhost.  Is this likely?  If so are 
there configuration options that I can change?

I have (and have tried 20 as well) 

        splaytime = ( 10 )

Both this and schedule variables  are in update.conf file (not 
cfagent.conf)

My cfengine version is 2.0.2 running on Solaris 2.5.1 to 2.8, I have under 
20 clients that pull stuff/check stuff  policy host.

Thanks for any pointers