That still doesn’t explain what it DOES 🙂
wp-cron is a scheduling feature that handles things like database back ups, email or scheduled posts to occur at certain times.
What has been produced is a system that allows plugin developers to schedule events to occur at certain times. It does this by checking the current time against the list of scheduled tasks every time a page is loaded on the site. If the set time has passed the task (a callback function) is done.
http://blog.slaven.net.au/2007/02/01/timing-is-everything-scheduling-in-wordpress/
http://wpdailybits.com/blog/replace-wordpress-cron-with-real-cron-job/74
Okay, thanks for your reply, some interesting details from those links.
As I have backups scheduled by the hosting company, and nothing is “scheduled” at all (I have comments, pings and tracebacks all turned off), then I will simply do this in wp-config.php ..
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true)