Scheduled tasks

Scheduled tasks and cron

The Totara 'cron' process is a PHP script (part of the standard Totara installation) that must be run regularly in the background. It's strongly recommended that the frequency of cron is set to be at least once per minute. The Totara cron script runs different tasks at differently scheduled intervals.

A special program, 'cron', is used to run the Totara cron script at a regular interval. The Totara cron script runs tasks including sending mail, updating Totara reports, RSS feeds, activity completions, posting forum messages and other tasks. Since different tasks have different schedules, not every task will run in Totara when the cron script is triggered.

The cron program (which runs the Totara script) is a core part of Unix-based systems (including Linux and OSX) being used to run many time-dependent services. In Totara Cloud this is configured by Totara.

Scheduled tasks purpose

You can find details on the purpose of each scheduled task on the associated component help page (as listed below):

• Program and certification scheduled tasks
• Enrolment scheduled tasks
• Totara Connect scheduled tasks