Cron triggered more than expected

Hello Community

I have a Cron node set up like this : every X, 110, hours.
I was expecting it to be triggered every 4,5 days. But this cron node is executed every 24 hours.

Is there a way to see how Cron are set up on my VPS ?

Thank you

Oh, that’s an interesting one, I have never used the node for timespans that long. I’ll do some digging on that one and will report back!

In the meantime, maybe you could give the Interval node a shot?

Good idea. I just replaced the Cron node with an Interval node :slight_smile:
We’ll see how it goes :slight_smile:

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Hey @Steph67, from testing this on my end I can confirm the problem with the Cron node and have added this to our internal bug tracker.

The Interval node (which I have also configured with 110 hours) did not run sine I’ve built my test workflows so this seems to be the way to go for now. I’ll keep you posted :slight_smile:

Thanks for your feedback @MutedJam

Same here, interval node has not been triggered since 3 days as expected, I’m waiting 2 more for the trigger.

That problem is sadly to expect right now with the Cron-Node. What it does underneath the hood, is setting a cron expression with the given value. So if set to “Every X minutes/hours” it sets the value for minutes or hours to */[the value]. Meaning it a value is set that is larger than 59 I am not sure how it gets interpreted at there is no 60th, 61st, … minute of the hour.

So best to use the Interval node if you need exactly 110h.

But also important to know that the Interval node starts to count from the second the workflow got activated. So if you set it to all 110h it will execute the first time in exactly 110h. If you deactivate it after 100h and then activate it again, will the timer be reset and it runs the first time again after 110h after you did re-activate it (and so after 210h after you did initially activate it). Meaning if you make a change to the workflow, it resets that timer.

So if you want that it execute in an predictable way, I would use a Cron-Node instead and set it to custom and something like 0 1 */4 * * which results in “At 01:00 on every 4th day-of-month.”. So would not be all 110h, rather all 96h. Here also a page which will make creating this values easier: crontab.guru

That makes sense @jan , thanks for the explanation. @MutedJam the 110 hour interval node worked fine by the way.

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Glad to hear this works for you and many thanks for confirming!