Scheduled events?

Question

PHP

I don't even know how to formulate the exact question.
In general, you need to perform one-time tasks in some perspective. In other words, the execution of the script at a given time (or according to a schedule, not cyclic). Here is something I don’t even know from which side to crawl to the question. What to google, what to read? What implementations to watch?
Application language - php. The software itself is not necessarily in php. Cron doesn't quite fit.

Answer 1

look towards the queue server.
kr.github.io/beanstalkd
gearman.org

Answer 2

cron
at