occurence of cron job effects

[dadamssg]

if i run a cron job every five minutes 365 days a year, will this slow down my website? or have any negative impacts for running so often?

[Daniel0]

That sort of depends on how many resources the script uses. The act of simply executing it won't.

[dbrimlow]

Just to illustrate.

 

For the last 8 years I have a cron on a local unix server that runs a macro, every fifteen minutes, 365 days, to generate a "goodly" sized .psv file from an informix DB and upload it to my web server, ; my web server's cron then checks every fifteen minutes, 365 days, for the new .psv file and loads it into a mysql DB.

 

Never had a problem in the entire 8 years. The psv file is anywhere from 700k to 1.5mb - and while that's a decent sized file, it is both generated then loaded in seconds.

 

That's just one of MANY complex jobs the crons run both locally and online.

 

If a task itself take up a lot of processing time, it does so regardless of the cron automation.

 

[dadamssg]

so if i did a cron job to run every 5 minutes to delete db rows, i wouldn't have a problem at all?

[Maq]

It all depends.  It's not the cron itself, it's the scipt and other issues.

 

It would depend on your server, how you have your DB setup, how many rows you're deleting, how optimized your code is etc...