Performance implications of using crontab to automate numerous DB tasks?

Question

I think I'm going to use crontab to run a bunch of scripts that will:

• close all expired posts
• accept uncontested disputes
• add interest charges
• email out invoices
• send "about to expire" notifications

I want the expired stuff to be removed pretty shortly after the event occurs, so I'm thinking about writing one script that will run and check for all these various dates every 5 to 15 minutes. Can I expect any troubles doing this? At what number of "posts" might I start seeing performance issues? Are we talking thousands or millions?

Answer 1

If you're doing anything with the "posts" and there's only 15k per year...I wouldn't worry about any performance issues with them on reasonably modern hardware for quite some time. Unless you're doing something pretty crazy with invoices, you shouldn't have issues with 250k per year for a good number of years. This is shooting from the hip though, it all depends on hardware and what exactly you're doing