sleep or cron job

[jackli]

sleep or cron job
(heh. no pun intended!)

For a script (or loop in the script) that should be executed every interval, is it better to use a cron job or php sleep()?

Also, for a cron job, how do you set it up to execute at a random (or otherwise changing) interval?

[Dan Grossman]

For a script (or loop in the script) that should be executed every interval, is it better to use a cron job or php sleep()?

Cron job. With sleep() you have to worry about what happens if the script dies. It'll keep using up more and more memory over time and become more and more likely to crash or do something unexpected.

Also, for a cron job, how do you set it up to execute at a random (or otherwise changing) interval?

Have it run on the minimum possible interval. For example, if you never run more than every 1 minute, then make it run EVERY 1 minute.

Put the logic of whether it needs to run on this particular minute in the script itself. It can simply exit if it has nothing to do.