Run a cron job every 5 minutes
“At every 5th minute.”
Probably the most-deployed cron schedule in existence: minutes 0, 5, 10 … 55, giving 288 runs a day. Five minutes is the sweet spot where data feels fresh to humans while leaving generous headroom for slow runs, retries, and rate limits.
*/5 * * * *Next 5 runs
Computing from your local clock…
Field by field
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | */5 | every 5 starting from 0 |
| Hour | * | every value |
| Day of month | * | every value |
| Month | * | every value |
| Day of week | * | every value |
Typical uses
- Health checks and synthetic monitoring probes
- Syncing recent orders/events to an analytics store
- Rotating log buffers or flushing metrics
Worth knowing: Thousands of servers firing at the same :00/:05 boundaries create thundering herds against shared APIs — offset fleets with 1-56/5 or 3-58/5 to spread the load.
Related schedules
Need a different schedule? Build and test any cron expression with live explanation and next-run preview, or read the complete cron syntax guide.