Poormanscron is a module which runs the Drupal cron operations without needing the cron application. For every page view, this module checks to see if our last cron run was more than 1 hour ago (this period is configurable). If so, the cron hooks are executed (which, for example, update RSS/syndication blocks), and Drupal is happy. These cron hooks fire after all HTML is returned to the browser, so the user who kicks off the cron jobs should not notice any delay.
WWW: http://drupal.org/
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