wp-cron

[quentin]

wp-cron.php : does anyone know what this does precisely ?
I keep seeing this kind of stuff in mod_status:

22-0   15209   0/4/16502   W    0.05   31684   0   0.0   0.00   81.44    91.121.23.16   www.unblogg.fr   GET /wp-cron.php?check=131accfed8363d4c40f4b38b43f9d129 HTTP/1.1

Which reads basically, that this query has been writing its answer since 31000 seconds. Every so often i see stuck processes, always wp-cron, hung for hours.
Do I need wp-cron ? Any reason it'd do such weird things ?

[Luke]

Need it? Yes. That's how the cache knows to be updated and such. (Object Cache)

Why it's getting stuck, I dunno. I've got apache spawning an assload of zombies at the moment. It was up to ~170 overnight. But, the load is still low. And yeah, it's MU that's generating it all.

Something, somewhere, is spawning a sub host(PID) process under the apache request process, but I haven't tracked it down yet.