How many of you run cron jobs? Most of you, I'm sure.

How many of you run them at 09:00, or 12:00 or 17:00 or other 'standard' times of the day? I'm sure many of you do that too.

We heard of a machine in the US that almost came to a halt every day at noon, because of the number of simultaneous cron jobs fired off by about 120 users. Not only did it cause a severe resource crisis at that point, but the ramifications of important jobs, which really HAD to be run about then, being delayed for up to an hour had legal consequences in some areas.

The cron table mechanism is very flexible, and although it might seem odd to schedule a job for 11:17 or 14:23, if it's only going to run once a day, why not? Not only will you be helping to avoid potential traffic jams, but also your job probably has a better chance of running when you want it to.