Hi @cjacob,
sorry for the late reply,
The settings are all about balancing resource consumption over accuracy with timers.
For the most use cases, you don’t care about a time difference of a minute when you wait for time that will expire in several days. For this reason, the engine implemented a increasing wait interval between job acquisitions, if there are no jobs to execute.
You can control the interval with the max-wait setting: https://docs.camunda.org/manual/7.12/reference/deployment-descriptors/tags/job-executor/#job-acquisition-configuration-properties
Your configuration makes the engine to ask the database every half a second for new jobs.
It depends on the overall performance requirements to your system if it’s worth to check for this small intervals or not.
Hope this helps, Ingo