What runs on a schedule

Hourly: the notification digest, the help-article sync, two ticket housekeeping sweeps, the release drop-folder scan and the usage prune. Every five minutes: the reply-by-email poll. Daily: trial reminders and expiries.

All of it rides on WP-Cron, which only fires when somebody loads a page. On a quiet hub, drive cron from a real system crontab instead — otherwise digests, syncs and trial expiries all run late.