Cron Bandwidth

[The Little Guy]

Not sure If I asked this before or someone else has, and I think I know the answer, but want to double check.

 

If I use cron jobs, that doesn't use up any bandwidth right?

 

A 2 side questions:

 

1. is it bad to run a cron job every minute?

 

2. is it bad to use cron to connect to a mailbox with IMAP functions every minute? Will that use bandwidth?

[zq29]

cron doesn't directly use any bandwidth, scripts executed as a result of a crontab have the potential to use bandwidth.

 

1. Depends on how much resources the scheduled task consumes

2. It will use bandwidth if the mail server is running on a box other than the one that is executing the script.

 

(By bandwidth, I'm assuming the internet variety)

[ober]

It shouldn't use bandwidth as long as it's talking to itself.

 

Yes, it's bad to run a cron job every minute

 

Yes, it's bad.

 

What are you trying to do?

[Daniel0]

Why would that be bad, ober? If you need to periodically check if there is new mail on a mail box then I see no better solution than doing so unless you've got direct access to the mail server itself.

[The Little Guy]

My host also doesn't allow for .forward anymore...

 

It just logs in, checks then quits if there is no new mail, otherwise it takes the mail and saves it into a db.

 

If there is no new mail, it doesn't even attempt to connect to the database.