query and mail every 60 seconds

[autumn]

Hi,

I have serveral scripts that need to be executed once a minute using cron and I was just wondering if this is going to considerably slow down the server or not?

Basically the script runs once a minute and needs to do the following each time:

• query mySQL (only about 10 records)
• check pop3 email, grab messages (about 5 emails).
• send about 6 emails.

This happens once a minute every day of the week.

Is this relatively simple to have the server run once a minute without putting too much load on the server?

Cheers,
A

[chaostik]

Hi,

I think most of those tasks are neither processor or disk intensive (well, depending upon the complexity of the MySQL query). I would be inclined to run sar and sar -b in the evening on your server, before setting the cron script active -- these commands give the ten minute averages for processor and disk usage repectively for the day to date. Keep a copy of these and then enable the cron task and run the two commands again in the evening of the following day. Compare the two and you should have a fair idea of how it is weighing on the machine. My guess is you'll barely notice a difference if it is a relatively new server with plenty of RAM.

All the best,

Louis Aslett