Cron example
Cron Every 5 Minutes
The step value in the minute field means start at minute 0 and fire again every fifth minute, giving twelve runs an hour at :00, :05, :10 and so on through :55. It is the default polling cadence for most teams because it is frequent enough to feel responsive and slow enough to stay cheap.
By NaveenKumar T · Updated · 5-field crontab expression
What each field means
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */5 | Every 5 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…
What the step value actually expands to
A step is shorthand for a list. Cron reads the minute field as the full range 0-59 sampled every fifth value, which expands to 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 — an identical schedule you could type out by hand. That equivalence matters because it explains the behaviour people find surprising: the interval is anchored to the top of the hour, not to the moment you installed the crontab.
So the gap between runs is always exactly five minutes, and the run times are the same on every host in the fleet. That is usually what you want for polling, but it also means fifty machines with the same entry will all wake at :00 and hammer the same API together. Stagger them by giving each host a different offset, such as 2-59/5 or 3-59/5, which keeps the five-minute cadence but moves the phase.
Steps that do not divide 60
Steps only stay even when they divide 60. Write a step of 7 and cron fires at 0, 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 and 56 — then the hour rolls over and the next run is at :00, four minutes later instead of seven. The same discontinuity hits steps of 8, 11, 13 and 40. Nothing is broken; the field simply resets at the hour boundary, because each field is evaluated independently against the wall clock.
If you genuinely need a seven-minute cadence, cron is not the tool: use a scheduler with interval semantics, or have the job sleep and loop under a supervisor. If you only need approximately seven minutes, round to a factor of 60 — 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 or 30 — and keep the schedule predictable.
Cost, overlap and variants
Twelve runs an hour is 288 a day and roughly 8,760 a month. On a metered platform that is a real line item, and on a shared database it is 288 connection storms. Before you commit, ask whether the work is idempotent and what happens if two runs overlap; a five-minute schedule with a four-minute job is one slow day away from concurrent execution.
To go finer, drop to every minute. To go coarser, every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes keeps the same anchored-to-the-hour behaviour. To keep the cadence but limit it to working hours, add an hour range and a weekday range to the same line.
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.