Theia uses cron quite liberally, because, well... it's awesome.

Cron is also "expected" after an installation by default, but there is something you can do to change this. First of all, let's explain why cron is expected...

We won't get into the technical details here, but simply put: Theia has uses a system of "events" to perform certain synchronization processes, sending notifications and similar tasks. The purpose of the event system is to remove a lot of the normal load from doing different things for the user on the site, and allow the server to process it shortly after independently from the user, and thus not affecting the performance of the user's experience. So it is recommended to use cron because it will provide a nice big performance boost for many things, but if you do not have cron, or if simply do not like cron and don't want to use it to process these events, then read on.

Processing events without cron

If you don't have cron installed, or don't want it to be used for processing events in Theia, then it's easy to reconfigure the event system to automatically process events (as soon as they are announced). To do this, go to the "tools" page, and look in the "system configuration" group of tools for one reading: "event processing" (admin tool 216). This page is straight forward as there is a single field you can select. Change the field's value to process immediately - as announced and click the save settings button. That's all there is to it!