"Unable to acquire lock within the time specified" #63

Now that I've gone back to using the scheduler-wide Redis lock, I'm once again running into an odd problem that I'd forgotten we had. Sometimes, when the scheduler attempts to get the redis lock, it crashes, rather than just failing to get the lock and then killing itself cleanly.

The traceback is:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "crontask/management/commands/crontask.py", line 52, in handle
    with utils.lock as lock:
  File "redis/lock.py", line 170, in __enter__
    raise LockError(
LockError: Unable to acquire lock within the time specified

I'm a bit baffled as to why this is even happening, as it seems like "unable to get the lock within the time specified" should be a completely expected outcome, so I'm not sure why it's being thrown as an exception.

Any idea what can be done about this?