Drupal comes with its own built in cron. This means that you can add your own job to the list of jobs that are executed when the Drupal cron runs.

Drupal runs all of these jobs at the same time. What happens if you want to run one particular cron job really frequently? You have to change your cron settings to run ALL of them that frequently. It’s an all or nothing affair and you end up running all the cron jobs as often as your most frequent job. That can put a lot of pressure on your web server.

A second problem is if you have a job that requires a lot of heavy lifting. With these jobs, you might want to run them overnight when traffic to your site is lighter and there is less pressure on the web server. But with Drupal’s built in cron, you can’t do that either because of the all or nothing nature of it. You run it once or not at all.

To solve this problem, you need a way to separate cron jobs so that you can run each job, or groups of jobs, at different times. There are two main options to achieve that - Elysia Cron and Ultimate Cron. In this article, we are going to look at Ultimate Cron because that is available for Drupal 7 and 8, where as Elysia Cron is Drupal 7 only.