If a user visits a site and his visit triggers a cron job that is quite intensive, the page load speed will be slower for him right? As I understand the page doesn’t wait for the cron job to execute before loading, but since the cron job would be running in parallel, it might still be the case that the page loads slower since the server is busy right?
2 s
Short answer – Nope. Any page request initializes the scheduled queue. It’s just an initialize request. Wp-cron request is a standalone request.
so requesting URL
/somepageyou just initialize request to/wp-cron.php
However – If cron event doesn’t work really well (it’s has 1000 db queries e.g. or its requesting a some really long-to-respond resource), or both, or re-scheduling cron event for each request… just like any other http request it will eat resources, CPU performance, memory, etc… if it eats enough resources, your page will become slower.