Building a Programmers Blog: Poor Mans Cron

Regular maintenance of your Drupal installation is important - without it, the website may become sluggish and you'll start having some odd issues. Fortunately, Drupal includes functionality to do this automatically.

When you install Drupal on a host you control, good practice is to set up a cron job to access http://mysite/cron.php on a regular basis.

If you can't set up a cron job of your own, however, all is not lost. Installing the module poormanscron allows your Drupal installation to perform regular maintenance as required.