How to set Google App Engine cron job using different interval in different period of time?

Question

How to config a cron job to run every 5 minutes between 9:00am~20:00pm, but every 10 minutes in other time of the day.

Answer 1

I would recommend just using every 5 minutes synchronized in the cron.yaml, and then just terminate immediately in the handler if the exact time is not to your liking (hour before 9 or after 20 and minute // 5 is odd, for example). GAE's cron is not very sophisticated, but running a trivial handler which just gets the time, checks whether that's OK, and terminates immediately otherwise, is pretty simple and cheap (and the 70 or so "extra hits per day", each with a trivial amount of resource consumption, will hardly make a difference to your app's overall resource consumption anyway).