Your GitHub Actions cron fires less often than you declared: what we measured and how to design for it
We run an automated publishing pipeline entirely on GitHub Actions cron schedules — no server, no queue, just workflows that wake up, do one thing, and commit the result. It mostly works. But there is one behaviour of scheduled workflows that the docs mention in a single quiet sentence and that will silently halve your job frequency if you design around the cron expression instead of around…
GitHub Actions cron schedules fire less often than declared, leading to reduced job frequency. This behavior is not an outage or misconfiguration, but rather a result of high load times that can throttle queued jobs. Scheduled workflows do not fire as often as stated in the cron expression, which can lead to unexpected consequences if downstream processes rely on the frequency of the jobs. The key is to design systems to be fault-tolerant and idempotent, so missed runs have minimal impact on correctness.
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