Can I disable the WP-cron and run a server cron and still use your plugin?

Some of our users prefer to disable the WordPress cron for performance reasons by adding the following line to their wp-config.php file:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Following by adding a job to their own cron tab that looks something like the row below to fire-up the WP-cron on a set interval.

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin */1 * * * * wp cron event run --due-now --path=/app/public/ --allow-root > /app/public/wp-content/cron.log 2>&1

Although our plugin can cope with this setup it might have some unwanted effects. Our plugin creates its product feeds in batches so as not to stress your website or run into time-out/memory issues. The batches are launched by the WP-Cron. Every time one of the batches has finished it creates a new job in the WP-cron which almost immediately starts the next batch. When the WP-cron has been disabled this job sits idle until the manually configured job starts the batch.

Imagine you have 10.000 products in your feed and configured your corn job to run every 10 minutes then you would need 13 batches times 10 minutes. It would take over two hours for the product feed to finish and that’s only when you have set your feed refresh interval on an hourly base. When it would be on a daily base it would take 13 days!

That is why we always advise our plugin users to enable the WP-Cron.