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This is a question about WordPress architecture, that I wasn't able to fully understand by reading WordPress documentation.

I have a scheduled event that can take more than 1 minute to finish because it's a heavy stored procedure that create a few caches on my database.

As far as I know, scheduled events in WordPress (wp_schedule_event) are triggered only when a request is made on the website. So, I imagine that if I schedule this event to run every day at 3:00 AM (which is the less crowded hour of my website) it'll trigger after 3:00 AM on the first request and it can happen a few minutes after this time if nobody is visiting it. Am I right?

Still, if I'm right, let's say a user opens my website at 3:01 AM and it triggers my scheduled event... will this user have to wait 1 minute until it ends so the website is loaded? Or this scheduled event happens in a thread?

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Yes, WP Cron won't run if nobody visits your site. You can also run into the PHP execution time limits

There are ways to mitigate this however:

  • Manually ping the cron URLs via a real cron job using curl
  • Run cron via WP CLI on a real cron job, letting cron jobs run arbitrarily
  • Use a job manager plugin such as cavalcade to manage cron tasks
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  • Thanks a lot, Tom! Your answer opened a lot of ways to help us out here! Only one thing wasn't clear for me... the first user to access the website after 3 AM will have to wait until the job finishes or does WP execute the event in a thread?
    – Adriano Castro
    Nov 6, 2017 at 19:11
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    Cron events are thrown in the background then users of the site don't need to wait.
    – mmm
    Nov 6, 2017 at 20:29
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    there are no threads in PHP, only additional non-blocking requests, WP Cron is called in a non-blocking request right at the very end of a page load
    – Tom J Nowell ♦
    Nov 6, 2017 at 22:43

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