Yeah, that way they also get a 3 hour nap

Oops yeah you’re right. Sorry OP. There’s nothing better than using a database that flushes to disk often enough that missing a small chunk of data due to interruptions should be fine. Probably some kind of memory mapped IO on top of eager writing filesystem should do a good enough job.

I thought someone here had mentioned that the environment and user executing the script at startup and you running the script might have differences. The reason it would have worked with systemd might be that the environment was loaded correctly?