Greasemonkey: how often script check updates with @updateURL

Question

On monkey Wiki : "Greasemonkey will check periodically for new versions of the script by downloading it". But what does it mean? Once a week? Twice a hour?

Anyone have real numbers?

Answer 1

While Hellion does point to the original post when auto-update was released in early 2012 this hasn't been true for some time. It isn't documented anywhere so we have to do some digging. You can see here Greasemonkey uses what looks like a built in Firefox mechanism to check and update. It is hard to tell when though. I know from experience that this is in fact a lot less that every 7 days. I have had it happen within an hour. Restarting firefox doesn't seem to trigger it but the shortest I have seen was within an hour. Furthermore if we search about:config in Firefox for update we can find a particular setting that kinda stands out. extensions.update.interval;86400. Obviously this is saying the extensions update interval is set to 86400 second (24 hours). Since Greasemonkey is tying the update process to a firefox update process I would think this is it. I will try changing this setting to see if I am right. Later this weekend when I am done with this userscript I am working on I will let you know what I find out.

Although this question is toward Greasemonkey I will go ahead and say Tampermonkey (Chrome) is much easier to check. Just click on the Tampbermonkey icon > Dashboard then go to settings and you can see check interval is set to 12 hours or whatever you changed it to.

Answer 2

According to http://www.greasespot.net/2012/02/automatic-script-updates-come-to.html,

By default updates will be checked for every seven days, and automatically installed when found.