There are definitely pitfalls of using cron for this kind of thing for production code. Particularly when the cycles are short.

You should consider what will happen if the task takes longer than the period you've set it to run from cron. If it's bad for overlapping runs (and it usually is, if for nothing else downward performance spirals when the system gets REALLY busy). Various locking schemes are possible to avoid the problems of overlapping runs, but most of them are trickier than it would seem at first and there are various race conditions to be considered.

But, you make good points about the simplicity of a crontab-based solution.

In reply to Re^2: File Loader (load the content of a file and insert into DB) by jordanh
in thread File Loader (load the content of a file and insert into DB) by r34d0nl1

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.