PatternCron
Every 5 minutes
A steady polling cadence for health checks, syncs and queue drains: */5 fires twelve times an hour, on every multiple of five.
Last updated
In plain English
- Fires at :00, :05, :10 ... :55 of every hour
- 288 runs per day
Why it’s written this way
*/5 in the minute field expands to every value from 0 through 59 divisible by 5 — :00, :05, :10 … :55, twelve firings an hour. The remaining four fields stay *, so it runs every hour of every day.
This is cron's step-value shorthand: */n is equivalent to spelling out 0,5,10,15,... by hand, but it stays correct even if the field's usable range ever changed.
Edge cases to know
- →Twelve clean runs an hour only works because 5 divides 60 evenly; a badly chosen step like */7 drifts through the hour and resets at the top of the next one instead of repeating a fixed interval.
- →If the job can take longer than 5 minutes under load, two copies can overlap — add a lockfile (flock) or a mutex before pushing the frequency any higher.
- →Every server in a fleet running this fires at the same wall-clock second; for anything hitting a shared downstream service, jitter the start with a short random sleep.