Drupal 7: pull out just the Twitter job as its own Cron job so that we could run it every minute

Question

Drupal 7: We are using the twitter module and it adds a job to Cron so that every time Cron is run it checks Twitter for the configured tweeter account and downloads to the Drupal Twitter table any new tweets since that last time Cron was run. Our customer wants to have close to real-time display of these tweets and we did not want to have Cron run every minute since we are concerned about the performance hit so instead we run it every 5 minutes.

Is their any way to pull out just the Twitter job as its own Cron job so that we could run it every minute which might not impact performance?

Answer 1

There are a couple of different cron managers available, personally I use Elysia Cron

Elysia Cron extends Drupal standard cron, allowing a fine grain control over each task and several ways to add custom cron jobs to your site.

But there's also Ultimate Cron which I understand is very good too

Runs cron jobs individually in parallel using configurable rules, pool management and load balancing.

Either of those will let you isolate the Twitter cron job to be run more frequently than the normal one.

Answer 2

For improved control over the granularity of cron jobs, you might look at Elysia Cron which would allow you to vary the scheduling on a task by task basis.

There is also Cron Control if you are in a clustered environment which would allow you to dedicate a particular server for cron jobs, taking the load off the other servers.