Improved Cron

If your WP-Cron jobs work when you have a visitor, then this plugin should work for you. The plugin uses exactly the same code as WP Cron does, just in a different way, and with safeguards, a keep alive, logging available, etc. The ‘background process’ is really a HTTP request that loops indefinitely until you press stop in the panel. I also use a lock file system to prevent multiple ‘processes’ starting, as well as provide a failsafe method of killing the process (if the lock file is gone when it wakes up, then it dies).

Yes, but only a small, fixed, amount of memory. During testing, I left the plugin running for a couple of weeks while logging memory usage each minute. There was no growth in memory usage (Iow, no memory leak) and a pretty small memory footprint (under 250KB).

The plugin calls wp-cron.php directly, so I doubt any stats programs will record these visits.

It just helps them run when you expect them to (+/- 1 minute). Normally, WP Cron requires a visitor so the actual run time of a cron job can be hours after you scheduled it to run.

I haven’t done any testing with WordPress multisite yet. I created it for a project I was working on and spun it off into a standalone plugin. Unfortunately, I haven’t made anywhere near enough sales to justify much extra development effort at this stage, however I’m open to sponsorship to test and/or extend it.