by Rick Jerz.
For a long time, I used to run cron every 30 minutes. But now that I see a recommendation of once every minute, I run my cron every 5 minutes. However, I typically have 200 or fewer students doing things in my courses every semester. If I had thousands of students, I would probably go with the 1-minute suggestion. I have a VPS, so I have more control over my
server, like cron settings.
So if you are stuck with 10 minutes, just use it. The effects of a longer time is that some tasks will not happen exactly when expected. For example, if a forum post is made, yep, moodle provides 30 minutes before it is sent out. But with a 10 minute cron cycle, it could happen that this forum post might not be sent for 40 minutes (30 + 10.) This is just an example of the interaction of cron and your Moodle.