Does anybody have any experience with Magento module level cron jobs across multiple instances of the application?
I know Magento adds the cron records to the cron_schedule table - would each instance of the Magento application add it's own call to the module level cron?
All application instances are looking at the same database.
Thanks for any insights.
If you have several copies of Magento with a common database then you have a multi-site install. Only add a cron job for one server, there is no need to have crons for any other.
Magento does not call the cron for you, you still need to edit the server's crontab. From the Magento Wiki:
To execute all these configured tasks, the cron.php file located in the Magento root will need to be run periodically, for example every 15 minutes. Basically, this script will check if it needs to run any tasks, and if it needs to schedule any future tasks.
In UNIX/BSD/linux systems you will need to add this line (or a similar line) to your crontab:
# for debugging purposes only: [email protected] */5 * * * * /bin/sh /absolute/path/to/magento/cron.sh # /absolute/path/to/bin/php - replace with path to your PHP5 CLI executable # example: /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cli # in order to find what is the PHP CLI executable you can try to the following command in shell: # which php # /absolute/path/to/magento/cron.php - replace with path to Magento installation # example: /home/user/public_html/magento/cron.php