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73416ba
(Get the code!)
/me has a flash of inspiration....
cron starts all the jobs approximately simultaneously, calling through pam to start sessions for each..... for each job, pam_ecryptfs.so increments the refcount file in /tmp/ - and the various invocations of pam_ecryptfs.so race with each other, in a textbook classic "lost updates" race condition.
When the jobs terminate, they've usually spread out enough in time that you are less likely to get the same loss of counter decrements.
Hence, more decrements than increments actually take effect, and the refcount hits zero.