By pgrote on

Hi,

I am trying to find documentation on what tasks cron.php does? Things such as populate the aggregator, trim log files, etc.

Thanks!

Comments

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

Any module can do anything at regular intervals using cron.

The module will have a function called modulename_cron(), and in it lots of things can be done.

Here are what core modules do with cron:

- The search module indexes content so it can be searched.

- statistics and watchdog modules cleanup old access statistics and log entries.

- aggregator goes out and gets RSS feeds from other sites

- node cleans the history table

- ping module notifies other sites of new content

- drupal module updates which sites have pinged

- The poll module closes polls at certain dates.

Contributed modules also do a lot of cron things. For example stockapi update stock prices, ...etc.
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jelo’s picture

jelo commented

Hi,

How do I find the log about the tasks cron executes? I have read a couple of times that I can get a display about what tasks are run, how long they ran etc., but I could not find out where this log is?

Thanks, Jens