It's seems that you perform the same action on each account - or it isn't true?
It's the same action yes. However it has to be, by design. Hard to explain why, but I cannot centralize the cleanup.php script and invoke it once through a single cron job. Basically, each web site has it's own installation of a custom applications. Each application has scheduled activities. So although the cleanup scripts do *exactly* the same thing - they operate on different databases. In order to centralize the cron scripts I would need to have the cleanup scripts look up each database, etc, etc...
By design of existing applications it's just to much work. It's easier to just setup multiple identical (albeit different) cron jobs for each site.
How intensive will be running these scripts?
Potentially huge, but typically a single conditional is all that is executed and an exit follows.
The way I see it...I either centralize the code for cleanup inside a single script by basically iterating a array of database connections, cleaning up and moving onto the next required cleanup or ignoring cleanup all togather and moving onto the next one. Or I let the OS handle that iteration by having multiple processes spawned, each to handle it's own cleanup. This would surely allow me to more effectively take advantage of dual/quad core processing power, as opposed to having a single monolithic script process do everything.
So, is it possible to configure cron to use a file created by PHP (www-data) as it's table (in addition to defaults) so that I may automate the process of adding/removing cron jobs??? Even if they are fired every 5 minutes??? No way to hack in a offset of sorts eh???
Cheers
