*/10 * * * * *
Cron reads this as: every 10th second, every minute.
This is a Quartz-style expression with seconds in the leading field. Standard Unix cron takes five fields and has a one-minute floor, so it will reject this line. See Quartz vs Unix cron for the differences.
Next 5 runs
Computed in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself evaluates against the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC — see time zones & DST if that distinction matters here.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
Six runs a minute, again Quartz-style with seconds in the leading field. Used for tight polling loops, health probes and near-real-time queue draining inside JVM applications.
What to watch out for
Almost nine thousand invocations a day is enough that fixed per-run overhead becomes the dominant cost — connection setup, framework initialisation, log volume. At this frequency, question whether polling is the right model at all: a subscription, a webhook or a blocking queue read will usually be both cheaper and more responsive. If you do keep it, cap the work with a timeout shorter than the interval.
The crontab line
*/10 * * * * * /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Redirect the output somewhere you will actually read it — by default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that means it is discarded. See the crontab guide for the surrounding syntax.
Related schedules
| Expression | Schedule |
|---|---|
*/30 * * * * * | Every 30 seconds |
0/10 * * * * ? | The same schedule in Quartz notation |
* * * * * | Every minute — standard cron |
Build your own
Need something this page does not cover? Compose it field by field in the visual builder, or paste an expression you already have into the explainer for a per-field breakdown. The examples library collects sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.