Switch from wp-cron to a server cron job

Question

I'm creating a wordpress plugin that trades cryptocurrencies. It's a bot and I need to check the currency values every 10 seconds. In order to do that I need to run a PHP script through a cron-job.

I've tried to use wordpress cron jobs, but they are not reliable as I would like about the execution time.

I would like to ask: Is there a way to execute my cron job every 10 seconds on my server with CPanel? I tried with cronjob on the CPanel but they have a granularity of one minute and it's not enough Thank you in advance

Answer 1

First, you'll have to determine an average time to execute your job. Run it once every minute, five times. Use error_log('Start');, and error_log('End'); to mark the start time, and the end time. Take an average of all five results and round it up to full seconds. Prepare your job to execute its logic 6 times in a loop:

$avgExecTime = 3; //replace this with the average execution time from your tests
$sleepTime = 10 - $avgExecTime;
for($i = 0; $i = 5; $i++) {
    //
    // your logic goes here
    //
    if($i < 5)
        sleep($sleepTime);
}

Now, you can set your system cron to run this job every minute, forever.

Note: make sure that your job's average execution time is less than 10 seconds. If it is not, increase the frequency to 15 seconds, and modify your job accordingly.