Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04: WP-Cron and GridPane’s GP-Cron

Option 3: Configure GP-Cron with a Custom Sec-Delay

While our fuzziness configuration is great for most use cases, we also have our custom delay flag “-sec-delay” which offers the ability to set crons at an exact interval.

The command is as follows – you’ll need to replace {site.url} with your website URL, {integer.minutes} with your desired cron frequency, and {second.interval} with your delay period:

gp site {sites.url} -gpcron-on {integer.minutes} -sec-delay {integer.seconds}

For example, if you have 10 sites on a server and they all need an exact regular 2-minute interval, you could set them up as follows:

gp site one.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 0
gp site two.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 10
gp site three.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 20
gp site four.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 30
gp site five.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 40
gp site six.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 50
gp site seven.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 60
gp site eight.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 70
gp site nine.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 80
gp site ten.com -gpcron-on 2 -sec-delay 90

This provides a 10-second interval between each cron job, and so the above would create the following schedule:

*/2 * * * * user1 sleep 0;
*/2 * * * * user2 sleep 10;
*/2 * * * * user3 sleep 20;
*/2 * * * * user4 sleep 30;
*/2 * * * * user5 sleep 40;
*/2 * * * * user6 sleep 50;
*/2 * * * * user7 sleep 60;
*/2 * * * * user8 sleep 70;
*/2 * * * * user9 sleep 80;
*/2 * * * * user10 sleep 90;

Maximum Allowed Delays

You can set sec-delays based on this formula:

max_sec_delay=$((minute_freq * 60 - 1))

This means you can set delays to cover the entire period but restricts crons from mistakenly overlapping.

For example, for a 3 minute frequency would work as follows: 3 x 60 = 180 seconds. 180 – 1 = a maximum delay of 179 seconds.

If you try to set something beyond this range, it will be refused and fall back to our default fuzziness.