PHP Concurrency via Cron

[Marwa]

I have a few scripts that need to run concurrently as separate processes. My plan is to have a cron job that executes multiple instances of these scripts at a set interval. Is this a good idea? What are the pros/cons to this approach? Are there any other options I need to consider?Bottomline: I'm trying to mimic multithreading. Any race conditions will be handled via code (e.g. setting statuses in DB, etc.). The scripts are supposed to do processing intensive tasks (e.g. creating thumbnails, etc.).