Celery beat is pretty much exactly the same thing as cron except it's another service to configure and worry about keeping up and running. And it uses 35 MB of

Celery beat is pretty much exactly the same thing as cron except it's another service to configure and worry about keeping up and running. And it uses 35 MB of RAM instead of...well, I guess cron uses a few kilobytes. I can't see the point of it at all. When I want to kick off celery tasks I just have a cron job execute a django shell command.