I understand that cron is basically a job scheduler. Apart from doing $sudo apt update which I like/love to run manually as it's uncertain when my bandwidth will be free for running the update, I don't know of any programs which would be useful to run via cron. In a SOHO environment, where I don't run LAMP, is crontab useful, if yes, which programs would benefit from it ? Are there any user applications which would benefit from it being in cron ?
I am on Debian.
In case you are using one or more SSD's, it may be beneficial to run the fstrim-all command regulary instead of using the discard mount option.
When the discard mount option is used, a TRIM command is sent to the SSD each time a file is deleted. This command tells the SSD to really delete blocks that have been marked for deletion. Some have reported that this decreases disk performance, but I have not yet tested it myself.
Ubuntu (since 14.04) already comes with the follwing entry in /etc/cron.weekly/:
#!/bin/sh # call fstrim-all to trim all mounted file systems which support it set -e # This only runs on Intel and Samsung SSDs by default, as some SSDs with faulty # firmware may encounter data loss problems when running fstrim under high I/O # load (e. g. https://launchpad.net/bugs/1259829). You can append the # --no-model-check option here to disable the vendor check and run fstrim on # all SSD drives. exec fstrim-all So a TRIM command is sent to the SSD once a week instead of on every file deletion. By doing so, single deleteions are faster, and the drive will stop responding for a short time due to trimming only once a week, which you probably won't even notice.
Tasks as:
can be programmed trough cron to be executed on certain times when they don't disturb usual tasks of the server,
