🧠 Drupal Tip #84: Set Up and Secure Your Drupal Cron with Ultimate Cron

One of Drupal’s often-overlooked systems is its cron — a tool that quietly runs in the background to keep your site healthy and efficient. It performs important maintenance tasks like indexing content, clearing out logs, running scheduled rules, and sending emails. But if you're still relying on Drupal's default cron, you're missing out on powerful control and performance options.

🔍 The Problem with Core Cron

By default, Drupal cron runs during a user’s page visit if the last run was a while ago. This approach:

• Can slow down page loads for visitors.
• Provides little transparency into which cron tasks are running.
• Lacks scheduling flexibility, especially for large or complex sites.

This setup may be enough for smaller sites, but growing or enterprise-level websites need a more advanced solution.

💡 Enter: Ultimate Cron

The Ultimate Cron module is the go-to enhancement for cron task management in Drupal. It brings structure, control, and visibility to your site’s maintenance processes.

🔧 What Ultimate Cron Offers

• Custom Scheduling: Assign different run intervals per cron task (e.g., every 5 mins, hourly, daily).
• Manual Execution: Easily run individual cron tasks from the admin UI.
• Detailed Logging: View logs and outputs for each task to debug issues.
• Concurrency Control: Prevents overlapping runs or allows parallel execution where safe.
• Execution Plugins: Choose how each task runs (e.g., via HTTP, Drush, or queue).

🚀 Best Practice Setup

1. Disable default cron (from /admin/config/system/cron).
2. Set up a real server cron job (e.g., using crontab) to run drush cron or use Ultimate Cron’s provided CLI hooks.
3. Use Ultimate Cron UI to define schedules for each task based on your site’s needs.
4. Monitor logs and fine-tune over time.

✅ Why It Matters

Reliable cron tasks ensure:

• Search indexes stay fresh.
• Caches are cleared on time.
• Queues are processed efficiently.
• Your site doesn’t grow bloated or outdated behind the scenes.