Feed Aggregator is not discarding old items

I originally setup my Feed Aggregator to discard items older than 16 weeks. Unfortunately the database grew too large and caused some issues with my hosting. I have now changed the "Discard items older than:" setti开发者_StackOverflow社区ng to 1 week and run the cron job (about 20 times) both automatically (scheduled hourly) and manually but the items from many months ago are still showing up in the feed aggregator

Is there another setting I have to enable somewhere to delete these feed aggregator items from my database? What might I be missing?

Never mind. I set and reset the options 4 or 5 times running cron in between and finally it kicked in.