Missed Schedule on latest WP version

WordPress’s scheduled post/cron system doesn’t execute events until a user visits the site. When users visit the site WordPress will check the queue against the current time an execute anything that is due. It won’t run without a request to the server.

For example, if you have a post scheduled for 7pm, but no one visits the site until 7:15pm, the post won’t be published until 7:15pm.

If you need a more reliable system this article explains how to set up an automated request to your site on a particular schedule: https://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-cron-jobs/

We just began experiencing this, seemingly out of the blue, though I’ve used computers long enough to know that we obviously changed something, even inadvertently.

We noticed it on our production environment first, which was updated to 4.8, and then tested on our development environment (same server), which was still on 4.7 (I know…). Same issue. So we left our dev environment at 4.7 and disabled all of our plugins and reverted to the 2016 theme and… it still happens. We get “missed schedule” within 60 seconds of the time that it should fire.

We get plenty of traffic to the production environment, and other cron-dependent things fire off just fine, so it’s not the low-traffic-causes-cron-to-be-missed issue. Despite that, though, we tried it by manually triggering wp-cron.php and it behaved exactly the same.

Thinking it must have something to do with our server environment, we tried it on another, existing WordPress site on the same server that gets zero traffic and is still on 4.7. It’s using the default theme and also has no plugins. On this one it works perfectly, and scheduled posts go live as scheduled.

Any thoughts?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by macgeekgab.