Cron example
Cron Every 15 Minutes
Fifteen divides sixty exactly four times, so this schedule lands on the quarter hours — :00, :15, :30 and :45 — with no drift and no short interval at the top of the hour. Ninety-six runs a day makes it the usual compromise between a schedule that feels live and one that leaves the machine alone.
By NaveenKumar T · Updated · 5-field crontab expression
What each field means
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */15 | Every 15 minutes, starting at minute 0 |
| Hour | * | Every hour |
| Day of month | * | Every day |
| Month | * | Every month |
| Day of week | * | Every day of the week |
Next 5 run times
Computing the next runs in your timezone…
Why the quarter hour is such a common cadence
Fifteen minutes is roughly the point where a delay stops being noticed. Sync jobs, feed imports, certificate checks, backup verification and metric rollups all tend to settle here: frequent enough that a failure is caught the same working hour, rare enough that a slow run has time to finish before the next one starts. It also aligns with how humans read clocks, which makes incident timelines much easier to reconstruct.
Because the run times are absolute rather than relative to installation, every server with this entry fires together. That is convenient when you correlate logs across a fleet and inconvenient when all of them hit one endpoint at once. Offsetting a host with 7-59/15 preserves the fifteen-minute rhythm while moving its runs to :07, :22, :37 and :52.
Trimming the schedule down
Ninety-six executions a day is a lot of work to do at 3 AM if nobody looks at the result before 9. Constraining the hours is a one-field change: adding an hour range and a weekday range keeps the quarter-hour cadence but confines it to business hours, cutting the daily count from 96 to 45 and removing the overnight noise entirely.
Going the other way, every 5 minutes triples the frequency and every 30 minutes halves it. If the job is doing meaningful work — a full export, a rebuild, an external API sweep — measure a single run first. A fifteen-minute schedule around a fourteen-minute job is a queue waiting to form.
Build a variant of this schedule with dropdowns and check the next ten runs before you install it.
Open the cron generatorRelated cron examples
Browse every schedule on the cron expression generator, read the cron expression syntax guide for the rules behind the five fields, or the developer tools guides for the longer explanations.