How Often Should I Run This

Hi, my site has allows users to sign up and buy e-learning courses.

As soon as they purchase a course, they have 1 week (7 days) to START the course so the following is set as soon as the purchase has been made:

  • $course_status is set to ‘purchased’
  • $start_timestamp is set (set to one week from the current time of the purchase)

I am running a cron job to check for courses that have not been started within the week (7 days) timeframe:

check all missions where $course_status = ‘purchased’
IF $current_timestamp > $start_timestamp SET $course_status to ‘not_started’
ELSE
do nothing

My question is, how many times should i be running this cron
a - run the cron 48 times a day (checking for courses that have not been started every 30 minutes throughout the day) (is this bad practice, would i be running the cron too often, with a possibility of slowing the site down)
b - should i add a $purchase_hour to the database and then run the cron every hour but only query courses where $purchase_hour = $current_hour (the hour at the time the cron is run)

Thanks in advance for your help on this

Why are you needing to check this?

The only reason you’d run a cron for something like this, is to notify the user that their time frame is expiring soon.

Yes that is exactly what i need to do