Why disable wp_cron?

[matt_stratton]

I know that wp_cron is disabled by default in bedrock; can someone shed some light as to why? I know how to re-enable it, I’m just curious as to the reasoning behind it (what am I missing by disabling it, what risks is it mitigating, etc)?

[kalenjohnson]

I believe the reasoning behind that is that wp_cron runs on page load, since it’s PHP based. That makes it unreliable as if you have something scheduled for 11:59pm but nothing hits your site until 8am, that task won’t run until then. It can also take a relatively long time to run as well, adding to someone’s page load time.

Ideally you should have an actual cron on the server you can use for regular tasks.

[fgilio]

Also, if the site is a high traffic one the wp-cron would check for scheduled task on every request thus wasting resources and probably slowing the system down.

[matt_stratton]

That makes perfect sense, and I appreciate the clarification!

[ben]

Schedule blog post doesn't work (for me)

@baardbaard WordPress internal cron is unreliable as it requires site traffic to fire. A more reliable and timely way to manage scheduled tasks is to disable Internal WP Cron and have the server handle timing. In short, cron jobs should be left to cron. Some of the background in this article may be helpful: http://ben.lobaugh.net/blog/20787/wordpress-how-to-use-wp-cron