what does this mean "Routine maintenance tasks ...."

[alistairgd66]

This meassge is in my ACP

 

Routine maintenance tasks are performed as users access the site but it looks like the traffic to your community is not sufficient to run these tasks on time.

 

What does it mean? It seems contradictory, ie the maintenance task needs lots of forum activity to run? 

Then

 

 It is recommended that you set up a cron or a web service to ensure a backlog is not created. If you have recently switched to the 'Run Automatically with Traffic' it may take a short while for the backlog to be cleared and you can ignore this message.

A cron job for what??

Can someone explain this?

Thanks.

[MADMAN32395]

Crons would do all sorts of different tasks. Not just routine maintenance.

If you can you could either setup a cron on the server or use the web cron feature.

[alistairgd66]

Yeh I know what a cron job is, but this cryptic ACP message does not say what cron job it is suggesting should be run...

[Dreadknux]

The cron stuff is explained better in ACP > System > Settings > Advanced Configuration > Server Environment. If you select Use Cron, the suggested cronjob is provided.

When some tasks (particularly ones that rebuild content, such as after the IPB3 to IPS4 update) run on large data sets, they only act on a certain number of items (e.g. 500) per request, so as to avoid timeouts or slow pageloads for your users. So the more content you already have, the more activity (which triggers tasks to run in the background) you need on the forum to complete the whole job before a backlog of new tasks is created. The cron method, if you choose to use it, triggers a task every minute.

[Nathan Explosion]

Simply put.....

Your site isn't busy enough for it to run the scheduled tasks regularly. So, set up the CRON job functionality to run it more often than you have people visiting your site. Sorry to be so blunt.

How to change things:

ACP -> System -> (Settings) General Configuration

Change things there.

[riko]

12 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Simply put.....

Your site isn't busy enough for it to run the scheduled tasks regularly. So, set up the CRON job functionality to run it more often than you have people visiting your site. Sorry to be so blunt.

How to change things:

ACP -> System -> (Settings) General Configuration

Change things there.

Uhm, Advanced Configuration you mean. :)

[Nathan Explosion]

Yeah - it was late when I posted that

[alistairgd66]

Thanks guys, I needed pointing in the right direction. I have one busy forum and one not so busy so this message took me by surprise.

 

Cheers.