cPanel hooks failing post-update: server administration challenge

hey everyone,

we're running into a pretty frustrating issue lately with cPanel hooks, and it's really messing with our workflow for 'Website Maintenance & cPanel Management Services'. as you might guess, we rely heavily on automated scripts via cPanel hooks for critical post-update tasks, especially for things like security hardening and caching configurations across our managed servers.

the core problem started surfacing after recent cPanel updates, specifically moving from v108 to v110, and it seems to persist through subsequent minor patches. our post-update hooks (like /usr/local/cpanel/hooks/post_update) are just intermittently failing to execute or complete correctly. this is causing significant manual overhead and delays in our server administration workflow, which is a real pain.

i've tried a bunch of things already:

• verified hook script permissions (they're 755, owned by root:root, as they should be).
• checked cPanel error logs (/usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log) and system logs (/var/log/messages) for specific errors related to hook execution. often, there's nothing useful.
• tested simple shell scripts as hooks – they sometimes work, sometimes they don't, which is super weird. more complex Python/PHP scripts are definitely more prone to failure.
• ensured no resource limits are being hit during the cPanel update process itself that might be killing the hook child processes. no obvious signs there.
• re-registered hooks using /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/rebuild_hooks_conf, but that didn't help consistently.

what i'm observing is that the hooks sometimes appear in the process list for a split second and then just vanish. or they execute partially. there's no consistent error output in the logs that points to a specific script syntax issue or permission denied. it really feels like an execution environment problem rather than a script problem itself.

here's an example of the non-committal error i often see:

[2023-10-27 14:35:01 +0000] info [cpupdate] 'post_update' hook failed with exit code 255
[2023-10-27 14:35:01 +0000] info [cpupdate] Hook '/usr/local/cpanel/hooks/post_update' executed with errors.

so, my specific questions are: is anyone else experiencing similar inconsistencies with cPanel hooks post-v108/v110 updates? are there new security contexts or execution sandboxes that might be silently preventing certain operations within hook scripts that weren't there before? also, are there any specific cPanel binaries or services i should be restarting or re-configuring to ensure reliable hook execution?

really hoping for some deep insights here. thanks in advance for any expert advice.