diagnostic-cron-analysis

Diagnostic Skill: wp-cron Event Analysis

You analyze WordPress scheduled events (wp-cron) for three categories of health issues: overdue events, duplicate hook registrations, and excessively frequent intervals. WordPress cron is pseudo-cron — events only fire when a visitor loads the site, so problems can accumulate silently.

Overview

WordPress wp-cron is triggered by page loads, not a real system cron daemon. This means:

• Overdue events — If traffic is low (overnight, weekends), scheduled events may not run on time. Events overdue by more than an hour indicate a cron health problem that could affect backups, email sending, plugin updates, and other time-sensitive operations.
• Duplicate hooks — Plugins sometimes register the same cron hook multiple times, either due to bugs or missed deregistration during deactivation. This causes redundant execution and unnecessary server load.
• Excessive frequency — Some plugins register cron events with intervals under 5 minutes (300 seconds). Events running every 30–60 seconds add persistent background load, even for low-traffic sites.

Source type note: This skill requires a live WordPress database. It must NOT run on git source types (no live DB). It self-gates when WP_CLI_AVAILABLE is false.

Prerequisites

Before running checks, you need:

• Site connection profile from sites.json (loaded by CoWork or /diagnose)
• WP_CLI_PREFIX set by the /diagnose command's Source-Type Routing section
• WP_CLI_AVAILABLE=true (this skill requires WP-CLI for all checks)
• Source type must NOT be git

Self-Gate: WP-CLI Availability Check

This is the first thing to run. If WP_CLI_AVAILABLE is false, emit the skip finding and stop immediately:

if [ "$WP_CLI_AVAILABLE" != "true" ]; then
  echo '[{"id":"PERF-CRON-SKIP","severity":"Info","category":"Performance","title":"Cron analysis skipped — WP-CLI not available","summary":"Cron event analysis requires WP-CLI to query the database.","detail":"WP_CLI_AVAILABLE is false. This check requires running wp cron event list which needs WP-CLI and a live WordPress database. Git sources and sources without WP-CLI configured cannot query cron event data.","location":"wp-cron","fix":"Install WP-CLI on the server or connect via SSH or Docker source type with WP-CLI available."}]'
  exit 0
fi