I'm not clear on what you are suggesting Lamont. 

If you're running chef via cron, you wouldn't use daemonized mode. And chef-client runs will pile up and run as the currently running ones are done. Even if you have a long chef client run the subsequent ones hopefully will not be that long since the system will be close to convergence. 

I don't like the idea of implementing some timeout here because what happens after the timeout do we bail out? If so why didn't we bail out in the first place?