[Feature Request] Cron Schedule from specific hour

[ShlomiD83]

Hi,
Is it possible to config a cron schedule to start from a specific hour (e.g 0 12/4 * * *)?
at the moment it's not possible, an error pops up about a syntax error.

Thanks.

[hackeysack01]

this is called stepping in the vixie cron docs
https://github.com/vixie/cron/blob/master/Documentation/Features.md

[begna112]

Just wanted to add that this also should allow formats like 4/10 * * * * to run every 10 minutes, begining at the 4th minute of the hour.

[ArthurMitchell42]

Hi,

Is it possible to config a cron schedule to start from a specific hour (e.g 0 12/4 * * *)?

at the moment it's not possible, an error pops up about a syntax error.

Thanks.

Plus one on this please

[alexjustesen]

Hi, Is it possible to config a cron schedule to start from a specific hour (e.g 0 12/4 * * *)? at the moment it's not possible, an error pops up about a syntax error.

Thanks.

@ShlomiD83 circling back on this one since cron came up on another issue recently. Could you do 0 */4 * * * to achieve every 4 hours?

[ShlomiD83]

That's the way I have it set now, the request was if we can run the test from a specific time and then 4 hours.
For example start at 2AM and from there count 4 hours and test again.

[ArthurMitchell42]

Hi Alex,
The issue with starting at midnight and multiple hours after that is that the results are heavily affected by quite a few background tasks like backup processes, downloads etc.
These all start every 4 hours for me and can take up to 1.5 hours to finish. The ideal way to get around this would be to run speed test every 4 hours but offset it by 2 hours to run at 02:00, 06:00 etc.
Thanks,
Arthur

[alexjustesen]

Thanks @ArthurMitchell42, didn't really consider that use case but makes complete sense.

I either don't have as much data as you or I'm spoiled with gigabit symmetric.

[ArthurMitchell42]

Oh wow, you are are lucky. The best I can hope for is about 73Mb/s down and 19 up even on a good day. 😀

[alexjustesen]

For later Alex, the package below seems to have better support for testing cron expressions for the use case above and also supports time zones which is a requirement of #929. I'll bring it into that PR and test it as a viable replacement.

https://github.com/poliander/cron

[alexjustesen]

@ShlomiD83 and @ArthurMitchell42 that other package ended up failing the validation criteria. While not ideal for the time being you could pass which hours you want the tests to run like so... 0 2,6,10,14,18,22 * * *