On the contrary the cron jobs and Etano's cache system is designed to lighten the load on server resources. It may have been a bit lighter without it if you only planned on having a small site with a few hundred members, but if you have a real busy site that has thousands of members, it would put much more stress on resources without having and effective cron task and caching system, your site would eventually start to run real slow. This is a common complaint with even some commercial grade dating and SN scripts, once they have a ton of members the site eventually begins to run painfully slow.
Etano is a commercial grade script designed to handle the load of larger member based sites.
Cron jobs technically in most cases aren't all that resource intense, your host just doesn't like it because they often put very limited restrictions on how much resources each site can utilize, especially on cheap hosting plans where there may be several hundred others hosted on the same server who all share the resources.
The main purpose of the cron jobs is to spread the load of various tasks to reduce the strain on the server.
Isn't that a bit unusual? having to run cron jobs for simple tasks like showing a new member's profile info on the site? Shouldn't that directly create new table cells, and then read from there?
It's a bit too complex to try and explain how the cron and cache system works, even I only have a general idea how it's all tied together and functions.
