Recipe · unix5

Every 5 minutes

*/5 * * * *

The shortest interval GitHub Actions reliably supports; fires twelve times per hour.

Why this pattern

Five minutes is the sweet spot for most polling and health-check jobs: frequent enough to catch a regression within a single SLA window, infrequent enough to not drown the downstream system in noise. */5 * * * * fires at 00, 05, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 of every hour, every day.

Variations

Every 5 minutes weekdays only: */5 * * * 1-5
Every 5 minutes during business hours: */5 9-17 * * 1-5
Offset by 1 minute (avoid top-of-clock spike): 1-59/5 * * * *

Platform notes

Five minutes is the GitHub Actions minimum — anything tighter is dropped. On AWS EventBridge, consider the cost: 288 invocations per day × 30 days × $0.000001/event is negligible, but the downstream Lambda or SNS notification fees add up at scale. Kubernetes handles this fine.

Try it

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