Report and Archiving Question

Hello,

I’m trying to understand the report and archiving settings for larger traffic sites ie. 5-10k daily visits.

If in theory I don’t set up chron and leave the auto archiving feature enabled and I set the reporting to run every hour, does that basically mean the stats (except for real time) wont update every hour? Eventhough it is wise to set up Chron how tough is it on the server when I’m accessing the archiving via the browser if I have the reporting set to every 3600 seconds?

Lets assume I have set the reporting to every 60 seconds on a higher trafficked site, does that really tax the server?

And the last question is does the chron override the reporting time frame if the auto archiving feature is disabled? ie I have chron set to 1 hour and the reporting set to 1800.

Please advise- thanks, Damon