[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #35323: Reschedule the Background Update cron for improved performance.

[WordPress Trac]

#35323: Reschedule the Background Update cron for improved performance.
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 Reporter:  dd32             |      Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |  Milestone:  4.5
Component:  Upgrade/Install  |    Version:  3.7
 Severity:  normal           |   Keywords:  needs-patch
  Focuses:                   |
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 When we first added Background Updates to WordPress in 3.7, we added a
 twice daily update check at approximately 7am "local time" (according to
 the blogs settings).

 What we didn't realise at the time, was that many sites have their
 timezone settings set to `UTC` even though the site isn't "based" in the
 UTC timezone (See #28988).
 What this has effectively caused is that WordPress.org gets a large surge
 of API requests around 7am and 7pm UTC daily which lasts approximately 2
 hours, during which the API requests are over twice the rate outside of
 that time.

 The 7am/7pm time slot is really not anything special anymore, the vast
 majority of WordPress background updates now happen within an hour of our
 release time through good planning.

 We should attempt to reduce the sudden surge of API requests to
 WordPress.org by re-scheduling the 7am/7pm daily job to a random minute
 during the day instead, it'll help with future WordPress.org API growth
 and ensure that a more consistent API response time is provided.
 We could either only re-schedule it if it falls within that time slot, or
 as it's not guaranteed to run at that time anyway, reset every schedule to
 a random minute instead.

 This needs a patch, but I'd suggest it be backported all the way down to
 3.7 and implemented as a once-off upgrade routine.

 FYI @nacin

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35323>
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