Every 5 Minutes

Use in your stack

# Run every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/my-job.sh

{
  "schedule": {
    "cron": "0 */5 * * * ?",
    "timezone": "UTC"
  }
}

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-job
spec:
  schedule: "*/5 * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: my-job
            image: my-image:latest
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

# AWS EventBridge schedule expression
cron(*/5 * * * ? *)

@Scheduled(cron = "0 */5 * * * *")
public void runEveryFiveMinutes() {
    // ...
}

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/5 * * * *'   # every 5 minutes (UTC)

Next runs

Pick a timezone to see when this expression fires next.

Variations

Common use cases

• Polling an external API for changes.
• Refreshing a cache or computed view.
• Health-checking a service from a monitoring system.
• Aggregating metrics into a time-series store.
• Running a lightweight queue worker.

Gotchas

• On GitHub Actions, the minimum schedule interval is 5 minutes — `*/5 * * * *` is the fastest you can go natively.
• On AWS EventBridge, this needs an extra year field: `*/5 * * * ? *`.
• Quartz uses 6 fields: `0 */5 * * * ?` (note the seconds field at the front and the `?` for day-of-week).
• If hundreds of jobs all use `*/5 * * * *`, they fire at the same wall-clock instant — adding random jitter avoids the thundering-herd problem.

Frequently asked questions