Poormanscron

A module which runs the Drupal cron operation using normal browser/page requests instead of having to set up a crontab to request the cron.php script. The module inserts a small amount of JavaScript on each page of your site that when a certain amount of time has passed since the last cron run, calls an AJAX request to run the cron tasks. Your users should not notice any kind of delay or disruption when viewing your site. However, this approach requires that your site gets regular traffic/visitors in order to trigger the cron request.

The 2.x versions are a backport of the automatic cron-running functionality included in Drupal 7. This module also includes the performance improvements of#566494: Running cron in a shutdown function breaks the site and only runs through an AJAX callback that is triggered via JavaScript only when necessary. This verison will be completely compatible with Drupal 7 core, so when you upgrade, you will no longer need to use this module.

The 1.x versions of the module uses hook_exit() to run cron at the end of the page request after the page has been sent to the browser, but has problems dealing with page caching. The 2.x version does not have this problem.

#D7CX: We don't need to pledge that Poormanscron will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released because Poormanscron is part of Drupal 7!