Poor Man's Cron

Many tasks on your Drupal site may run as scheduled tasks that occur with the built-in Drupal Cron (also known as poor man's cron).  This may include:

• Link Checker scans of your site content for the Broken Links report
• Indexing of new content and edited content for autocomplete/search functionality throughout the site's backend
• Updating the XML sitemap
• Importing any data from external sources
• Performing site backups (if the Backup & Migrate module) is being used [this is separate from the site backups setup with your hosting provider]

By default, Cron is set to run every 24hrs. If you ever need to force it, use one of the three methods below:

• Go to the Home icon > Run Cron
• ​Go to Configuration > System > Cron, click the button to Run Cron
• Simply visit the site specific cron url   

Note the site can take a performance hit while this is running, depending on how many processes it needs to go through in its cycle.

Granular Cron Job Scheduling with Elysia Cron

Site builders / administrators can get more granular cron job scheduling capabilities by installing/enabling Elysia Cron [https://www.drupal.org/project/elysia_cron] as well as the ability to force run individual cron jobs/tasks (as indicated by the two screenshots below).