Re: [tlug] Efficiently executing a cron job on my webhosting server

[steven smith <sjs@example.com>]

Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> Nguyen, Darren, Steven,
>
> Thanks for responding.
...
> I'd like for it to not send me anything except error notification. Is that
> possible?

It depends on what your control panel will allow you to do. 
 Probably errors get sent to stderr so to loose that you 
would redirect stderr to /dev/null.  This is easy to do from 
crontab, but I don't know your control panel.
> Also, I think this may be related, I want to make sure the PHP script 
> cleans
> up after itself and doesn't use up any memory or create any temp files that
> stick around after it's done. I have a vague notion that a PHP script might
> allocate resources when it runs, but I'm not totally sure if it always does
> no matter what.

tmp files for something like php probably get cleaned up 
except during error exits.  I assumed you had a command line 
inerface.  You could run 'du' to check disk usage 
periodically to watch disk usage.
> How can I be sure that my PHP script won't eat up memory?
Unless something very strange happens, the OS recovers any 
memory allocated to the process when the process exits.  You 
may need to keep an eye out for tmp files, but I doubt it 
will be a problem.  There may be some log files PHP keeps, 
but I don't know.
>