"(CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)" error in the syslog

Linux uses mail for sending notifications to the user. Most Linux distributions have a mail service including an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) installed. Ubuntu doesn't though.

You can install a mail service, postfix for example, to solve this problem.

sudo apt-get install postfix

Or you can ignore it. I don't think the inability of cron to send messages has anything to do with the CPU spike (that's linked to the underlying job that cron is running). It might be safest to install an MTA and then read through the messages (mutt is a good system mail reader).

This happens because your cron jobs are producing output and then the cron daemon tries to email that output to you (i.e. root). If you don't need that output, the easiest way to solve this is to discard it at the crontab:

sudo crontab -e

and add >/dev/null 2>&1 to every job:

* * * * * yourCommand >/dev/null 2>&1

In my case, the message was hinting at a permissions problem with the bash script, but I couldn't see it until I installed an MTA.

As suggested I ran:

sudo aptitude install postfix

I chose "Local" during setup and after running the cron job again:

sudo tail -f /var/mail/<user>

In my case I replaced

<user>

with "root".

I was then able to see the error output related to permissions.