What is a Daemon?

Some people use cronjobs for the same Possible use cases. Crontab is fine but it only allows you to run a PHP file every minute or so.

  • What if the previous run hasn't finished yet? Overlap can seriously damage your data & cause siginificant load on your machines.

  • What if you can't afford to wait a minute for the cronjob to run? Maybe you need to trigger a process the moment a record is inserted?

  • What if you want to keep track of multiple 'runs' and store data in memory.

  • What if you need to keep your application listening (on a socket for example)

Cronjobs are a bit rude for this, they may spin out of control and don't provide a framework for logging, etc. Creating a daemon would offer more elegance & possibilities. Let's just say: there are very good reasons why a Linux OS isn't composed entirely of Cronjobs :)

Possible use cases (Previous) How it works internally (Next)
Last updated: Sat, 16 Feb 2019 — Download Documentation
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