Cron expression for every 5 minutes

Every 5 minutes is one of the most widely used cron schedules in production systems. It strikes a balance between near-real-time responsiveness and reasonable resource consumption.

Common applications include health checks and uptime monitoring — pinging internal services or external dependencies and alerting if they're down. Many infrastructure teams use this interval for lightweight synthetic monitoring that complements heavier tools like Datadog or Pingdom.

Cache warming and invalidation is another frequent use case. If your application serves data that changes every few minutes (stock prices, sports scores, inventory counts), a 5-minute cron job can pre-compute and cache the results so that user-facing requests never hit the database directly.

Note that */5 fires at minutes 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 — always aligned to the clock, not to when the cron daemon started.