Do I need to use cron for this?

[Dennis_Gull]

Hello, I have programmed an auction site and now I want to send out an email to the winner and the seller with the contact information after the auction is over. I can make a page that generate all auctions thats ended and then set them to quantity = 0 and at the same time send out an email to the buyer and seller. Now heres the question. Should I use a cron job to update the page once in the hour or is it any other solution on how to send automatic emails during certain circumstances? I have no experience with cron but by webhost supports it so I can probably get it to work.

One more thing. Does the website get slowed down if you use the cron job to often?

[Twey]

In this case the cron job is definitely the better way forward. If nobody accesses the site within three hours of the winner winning, for example, the winner won't get his/her email for another three hours.

One more thing. Does the website get slowed down if you use the cron job to often?

A little, certainly, but only due to the task. cron itself (or at least most distributions of it) has very little overhead.

[Dennis_Gull]

Thanks for the fast reply, I guess I will try to use CRON then.

Do you know any good tutorials on how to get a CRON job up and running? I cant find any FAQ on how to use it at my webhost.

Edit:

I just got a respond from the host support section, they pointed me to a section where I can place the cron job but still got one little quesiton:

It says "Mail to: <my mail>" should I change <my mail> to the page I want to get updated?

Edit again:
It was the report mail, I got everything up and running now.