Do cron jobs use a lot of server resources?

[denvercardonations]

I am just wondering. if they do it could be using up my resources?

 

[Inquestor]

From my experience it's not so much the cron job but what script the cron job will be running that determines the amount of resources you'll use.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

Another thing to watch out for is a cron that runs to frequently for the script it is launching. Let me give you an example.

You have a cron running once per minute. It runs a script that takes 5 minutes to run. Now the cron is spawning multiple instances of the same script. This can start eating up your RAM.

If the script you need to run via cron uses a lot of resources, be careful that you are not running it again and again if it is already running. The best thing to do here is to add code to the start of the script to detect if it is already running and just exit.