Just curious, how many shared hosts will allow their clients to schedule cron jobs?

Aye, we do allow it.

Scott -- do you put any limit on how often cron jobs can be run? If someone wanted to run a script every 1 minute would that be a problem?

I would have no objection whatsoever as long as the script wasn't bringing the server to its knees and was well enough behaved; for example it must be intelligent enough to know whether or not a previous instance has ended before executing.

I can ditto Scott on this one. We have no problem with cronjobs, even frequent ones, as long as they are well behaved.

This is one of those "many hosts do and many hosts don't" areas so it's a good question to ask prior to signing up just to be sure.

Definitely do offer this at our company, both on linux and win2k....

The process will be screened by one of the administrators on call when the cron addition request is made, though I honestly can't remember when something of this nature has been refused. Our control panel on linux (CPanel) lets end-users control their particular user cron- though that can only provide so much functionality. Anything that is scheduled as an admin account and/or root will definitely be screened before being implemented.

I would imagine this is how it works most anywhere, if the service is actually supported at a particular webhost.

We also allow cronjobs, with no limit, provided it was not hindering the server’s performance. :)

I think people put too much emphasis on server performance and load. Unless there is a script running wildly out of control hogging CPU power cron jobs should be something that should be something all hosts should allow.

phpJames.... Hogging CPU power is what they are trying to prevent...

Out of all the hosts out there what % of users (shared/virtual accnts) actually use crons?
2-10% I'd bet.

Most don't need them, don't know what they are, how they work, or what the heck to use them for.

Yeah most crons are simply scripts that usually are not resource intensive.

But, there will always be that one guy who wants to grep the entire file structure every 5 seconds for something stupid or whatever....

And I'll leave your

I think people put too much emphasis on server performance and load

comment with simply an :eek: and I completely disagree w/ you :D... I want my site on a box w/out resource hogging scripts and a low server load.

If boxes were properly setup to limit users process threads and memory usage (eg login.conf/freebsd) then you wouldn't have to worry about a single person bringing your server down to its knees :D

Studio64,
:D True on the cron thing. Not many use them but I would hope that any good host at least has this option.

If a box with 300-500 users has an issue with load then yes that would be a concern. Good points to all this chatty chat. :)

Studio64,
Nice sig by the way... whered you get that one. :)

Greetings:

Our parent company allows it. There used to be a limit of once an hour execution, but now there are no limits other than the acceptable use policy.

Thank you.

*sigh*.. yep.. we allow it.. oh and 8 mins to my bday! weee!

What is cronjob anyway?

Originally posted by 464181
What is cronjob anyway?

Crond is service which runs on UNIX which allows you to run programs or scripts at regular intervals without the need to be present.

A task scheduler in other words.