send email alerts creates hundreds of processes

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I have an askbot installation running on a single box in my company. There are a slightly more than 1000 users registered. I setup a cronjob to send out email alerts to get more eyeballs on the questions and encourage people to contribute. However, this job spins up a lot of processes on the machine and everything comes to a halt.

Has anyone seen this problem? Is there a way around this?

* 6 * * * /opt/virtualenv/askbot/bin/python /opt/askbot/deploy/manage.py send_email_alerts 2>&1 >> /opt/askbot/deploy/log/askbot_email.log