PatternCron
Every 6 hours
A four-times-a-day cadence for cache warms and report refreshes: */6 lands cleanly on 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00.
Last updated
In plain English
- Fires at 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00
- 4 runs per day
Why it’s written this way
*/6 in the hour field takes the range 0–23 and keeps every sixth value starting from 0 — 0, 6, 12, 18 — four evenly spaced runs across the day. Minute stays 0, so each one fires on the dot.
Because 6 divides 24 evenly, the step never resets mid-cycle; every day looks identical. That isn't true of every divisor, so it's worth checking that a step actually tiles the field's range before trusting the spacing.
Edge cases to know
- →Four fixed times a day means every run lands during business hours somewhere in the world; if the job is heavy, that's worth knowing before it competes with real traffic on a shared box.
- →A deploy or restart that happens to land near one of the four windows can eat that run silently — there's no cron-level alert for a job that never started.
- →If the real requirement is 'four times spread through my working day' rather than 'every six hours counting from midnight,' this expression is the wrong shape — list four explicit hours instead, e.g. 0 8,12,16,20 * * *.