Thread:Project:Support desk/Upgrade to 1.22.0 from 1.21.2 causes indefinite loading of pages. Possible problem with runJobs.php script and/or cookies?/reply (2)

I don't really understand what runJobs.php does. From what you've said and what I've read in the Manual:runJobs.php article here, it makes sure that jobs are executed and so is run every time a job (e.g. loading a new page) is started? But, it seems like jobs can still be executed without the script? Unfortunately, I don't have shell access on my server (I just have a shared hosting Host Gator server), but what confuses me most is that it seems that when this script is executed manually, its to clear the job queue, and this sentence in the article particularly caught my attention: '''You may wish to use this script because your wiki's traffic is too slow to clear the queue, or there may be an exceptionally large number of jobs to clear. Be advised though that for many server configurations this can cause your wiki to become sluggish or even unresponsive until the script completes.''' But if its running all the time, it seems like it could take a very heavy burden on smaller servers like mine. Because of that, according to Manual:Job queue it seemed like the best thing to do was to decrease the Job Rate, so I did to $wgJobRunRate = 0.01; as in the example in that article. That seems to have fixed the loading issues of my pages, but I still don't really understand how/why. Would someone be able to explain or point me in the right direction to understand what the job queue is and how it works? Thanks!