Event-Driven Scraping vs Cron Jobs: What Actually Works at Scale

Why this comparison matters now Most scraping systems start with a cron job. It’s simple. Schedule a script, run it every few hours, collect data, store it. For small workloads and stable sites, this works fine. It’s predictable, easy to reason about, and doesn’t require much infrastructure. But the moment you move beyond a handful of sources or start relying on data for real-time decisions, cracks begin to show. Jobs overlap. Data gets stale. Some runs collect nothing new, while others miss imp