Is There an Alternative to Cron Jobs?

Question

We have a large number of potential Easyblog users on one server, potentially several hundred, and are concerned about setting up hundreds of cron jobs that run every 5 minutes. Is there an alternative to cron jobs for email, Twitter and import feeds? Would having that many cron jobs running degrade our server performance in your opinion? Is there a way to consolidate cron jobs so that we don't have to run so many?

Adam Wilner · Accepted Answer

Ok, here's the solution we came up with in case it might be helpful to anyone else with a similar problem. We got it down to one cron job for all sites on our server. We created a script for the cron to run and that script will run all the tasks for each site. It looks in the account folder (/home in our case) for an Easyblog install (looks for the file easyblog.php in the components folder). It loops through the accounts and if it finds Easyblog, then it finds the URL for the site and calls the cron task or cronfeed task as necessary. It's a PHP script that runs from the command line. It could also be a bash script or anything you want. I could provide the script for anyone interested. Thanks.

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Is There an Alternative to Cron Jobs?