Reduce cron processor usage

Question

We have 2 machines that we use for quicktime broadcaster for webcasting/recording live events. While one is fairly powerful and never uses a ton of CPU power, the other is a older powerbook which jumps up to the 90%'s when running.
On each machine, we have a script in root's crontab that runs every minute, and it seems to take up ~5% or so when it runs. It's important that the script runs every minute but not important how long it takes.. right now, its usually just a second or two. However when the powerbook in webcasting and the script runs, sometimes there's a little hiccup in the video that's recording, im guessing cause the processor reaches 100%.
Is there any possible way to reduce the importance/load of cron to fix this?
P.S. the cron command that runs is a "cat file > file2" command

Answer 1

cron itself isn't the problem, it's the command that cron's running that's the problem. You could change the nice value of the command so that it becomes "nicer" and let's other processes go ahead of it in the run queue. Check out the man pages on nice and renice:
man -k nice
Roger