Cron is great, right? For the uninitiated, if there are any of you left, Cron is a task scheduler that makes it possible to run various scripts and programs at specified intervals. This means that you can write programs that "do a thing" in a stateless way, set them to run regularly, without having to consider any logic regarding when to run, or any kind of state tracking. Cron is simple and the right way to do a great deal of routine automation, but there are caveats.

At times I've had scads of cron jobs, and while they work, from time to time I find myself going through my list of cron tasks on various systems and removing most of them or finding better ways.

The problems with cron are simple:

  • Its often a sledge hammer, and it's very easy to put something in cron job that needs a little more delicacy.

  • While it's possible to capture the output of cron tasks (typically via email,) the feedback from cronjobs is hard to follow. So it's hard to detect errors, performance deterioration, inefficiencies, or bugs proactively.

  • Its too easy to cron something to run every minute or couple of minutes. A task that seems relatively lightweight when you run it once can end up being expensive in the aggregate when they have to run a thousand times a day.

    This isn't to say that there aren't places where using cron isn't absolutely the right solution, but there are better solutions. For instance:

  • Include simple tests and logic for the cron task to determine if it needs to run before actually running.

  • Make things very easy to invoke or on demand rather than automatically running them regularly.

    I've begun to find little scripts and dmenu, or an easily called emacs-lisp function to be preferable to a cron job for a lot of tasks that I'd otherwise set in a cron job.

  • Write real daemons. It's hard and you have to make sure that they don't error out or quit unexpectedly--which requires at least primitive monitoring--but a little bit of work here can go a long way.

Onward and Upward!