[Sunhelp] at job problems

[Mark Sailer]

Looking for some assistance in explaining how "at" runs.
This is running on a E6502, 20 cpus, 20g RAM, SOLARIS 7

Our developers have a script that calls some exectuables based on
certain parameters.  The call in the script is "at now".
By time the script ends, the time for the at jobs is already in the
past.
It can take a few minutes or more before the at jobs run.
I have already modified /etc/cron.d/queuedefs to read
a.30j10n
b.2j2n90w 
restarted cron and have rebooted the server.

After I run the users script (some long list of stuff |at now)
and this is what I get:

lassie:/u/rts 3> date
Mon Jul 31 18:51:44 EDT 2000
lassie:/u/rts 4> at -l
965083827.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:27 2000
965083828.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:28 2000
965083829.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:29 2000
965083830.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:30 2000
965083831.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:31 2000
965083832.a     Mon Jul 31 18:50:32 2000
lassie:/u/rts 5>        

As you can see, only 6 jobs (much less than the 30 jobs queued).    

I have tried running at jobs by hand (at now) and have seen where it can
take over 30 seconds, even minutes for the job to be processed from the
queue and it is the only queued job.  The job is a simple "ls".

What's going on with cron and at jobs?
I'm getting beat up over this and I can't explain what is happening?

Thanks
Mark