I'm evaluating a site that has poormanscron running successfully, whilst linux cron is readily available. I do not know why the developer chose poormanscron.

I was about to recommend changing over to linux cron. I assumed there would be a performance enhancement but then I read on the poormanscron project page "These cron hooks fire after all HTML is returned to the browser, so the user who kicks off the cron jobs should not notice any delay."

So what are the disadvantages of poormanscron?

Comments

ghoti’s picture

The individual user kicking off the cron won't notice any more delay than if he weren't kicking it off, but the fact that the system is checking whether it's time to run, each and every page load, affects system performance far more than if you weren't doing any of that processing at all.

The unix cron daemon is also more precise; it'll generally start a job within a second of it being scheduled. With poormanscron, you're reliant on user traffic, which cannot be guaranteed. A bit of a catch-22 I'd say -- poormanscron is made more reliable by increasing traffic, which causes even greater system load with the cron test running after every page.

Paul Chvostek - it.canada - climbers.org

frank0987’s picture

The unix cron daemon is also more precise; it'll generally start a job within a second of it being scheduled. With poormanscron, you're reliant on user traffic, which cannot be guaranteed. A bit of a catch-22 I'd say -- poormanscron is made more reliable by increasing traffic, which causes even greater system load with the cron test running after every page.

There is another thing bad, if you just publised your site to the world wide web, cron might not run for a while (until you get some traffic). It's just better with a scheduled cron task.

dmuth’s picture

One issue you need to be aware of with Poormanscron is that there is a race condition in the code. This can cause a heavily loaded system to go into a "death spiral". However, myself (and others) have written patches, found here:

http://drupal.org/node/43511

That being said, I think that poormanscron is still an awesome module to use, and I use it all of my production sites. If you need any help with the patch, feel free to contact me directly.

-- Doug