How does time drift affect cron jobs and scheduled tasks?

[ChloeQG]

I just spent three hours trying to figure out why my app's scheduled task wasn't running, and it turns out the system clock had drifted by a few seconds, which completely broke the cron job's timing. I never realized something so small could cause a silent failure like that. Has anyone else run into problems with time synchronization throwing off their automated processes?

[JackP]

Yep, I ran into this once. A tiny drift in the system clock pushed a cron job off by a few minutes and I only noticed after checking the logs.

[EricR]

I had a similar wake‑up call when a weekly task finished late after DST changes; we added a simple check that logs the difference between host time and a reference, and it alerted when the delta exceeded a threshold.

[AndrewT]

I still wonder if it was the host clock or the container clock; we had a case where a container's time diverged and the job fired at the wrong moment even after syncing, but I can't say for sure.

[Noah98]

Did you verify the root cause, or could a misconfigured timezone be the real issue?