#wp-cron

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Better wp-cron using linux’s crontab

WordPress has something called wp-cron. If you haven’t head about it, its fine. But please be aware that you cannot live without it! That is why, I am not asking you to disable wp-cron.

Disable wp-cron

Still, we need to disable WordPress default wp-cron behaviour by adding following line to wp-config.php file:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Setup a real cronjob

From your Linux terminal, first open crontab:

crontab -e

Then add a line like below in it.

*/10 * * * * curl http://example.com/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

OR

*/10 * * * * cd /var/www/example.com/htdocs; php /var/www/example.com/htdocs/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Please make sure you use correct path to wp-cron.php.

Above will run wp-cron every 10 minutes. You can change */10 to */5 to make it run every 5 minutes.

Difference between two-lines is, first one uses PHP-FPM (or PHP-CGI) and second one uses PHP-CLI. CLI scripts do not have time limits. Depending on your setup, it may be desirable or undesirable.

Is it recommend for high-traffic site?

I haven’t digged into wp-cron a lot but what I know is that it executes on every page-load. So if there is a long running process which gets triggers by wp-cron, it will delay page loading for that user.

Using crontab, wp-cron is run by independent PHP process. So it will not interfere with any visitors page-request.

What’s a Cron Job?

Cron Job…

What the heck is a Cron Job?!

According to Wikipedia,

The software utility cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. People who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. It typically automates system maintenance or administration—though its…