Mysterious hit by /wordpress/wp-cron.php?check=

Have you made any future timestamped posts? I believe wordpress uses the wp-cron.php in implementing scheduled posts.

blepoxp: No, I haven’t made any future timestamped posts.

Are you using any plugins? Lots of plugins use wp_cron (backups, pings, subscription emails, etc)

Wouldn’t cron be checking for future posts even if none were made?

Hey! That makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that?

*chuckle* That’s why I get paid the big bucks. ??

drmike: No, wp-cron would not check for future posts unless they were made. The scheduler for future posts is a one-time event that’s scheduled for the time of the post itself, and it’s scheduled when the post is made.

Terryphi: You need to change your .htaccess so as to allow that wp-cron hit to go through.

WordPress activates wp-cron whenever it thinks that there is a scheduled event it needs to process. That scheduled event could be anything. In your case, it’s probably wanting to process pings and MIME type checking for a post you made. It will do that for every post, that’s normal.

By blocking the call to wp-cron, you’re preventing this from happening, and so it will try to do it every single time somebody hits your page. The only way it will ever stop is if you allow it to actually happen and thus allow it to do its job.

WordPress runs wp-cron as an external webrequest so that it will process the cron stuff in the background, and not in the foreground while the reader waits for it to run.

There are several reasons that WordPress runs wp-cron, and yes, it is critical. You cannot block it (for very long anyway) without breaking some things.

I believe things like post-notification to the various tracking sites is done via cron events now. So if you had a ton of posts, and a lot of notification sites on your list, possible you’d get those kicked off frequently.

Just a thought.

-d

Otto et al.

How do I change the .htaccess file?

The only reference I could find stated

<files wp-cron.php>
Order allow,deny
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</files>

Is that correct?
And how do I find out which IP I should use? Or is 127.0.0.1 universal for intern? or can I use the actual domain name?

modifoo: How you fix the problem depends on what the problem is. You need to start a new thread explaining your issue there.

I have WP2.5 at my site https://geoffjones.com. I am also getting lots of 404 errors of the type /wp-cron.php?check=9fed6b94770b937716a1b57dcf4a31aa from my IP address the site also runs slow. Can anyone help in resolving this issue