There is rebake old posts count option in admin settings with this description:
Number of old posts to be rebaked every 15 minutes
At first I thought that Discourse always rebakes some old posts, but after looking at the baked_at field of old posts I noticed that it does not happen.
So I looked into the source code, and it seems like this option is used only for rebakes after some major updates/fixes in Discourse (and so far there was only one such case in 2017).
Maximum number of posts to be automatically rebaked after major changes to the Discourse rendering engine every 15 minutes.
Maximum number of old-version posts to be re-rendered to HTML every 15 minutes. Will only impact major rendering engine upgrades. (once every few years)
Hard to know what fidelity the description here needs?
Can we perhaps hide this setting altogether? It seems sooo rare that anyone would need to mess with it at all, and it’s so very specialized. A setting you only (maybe?) need to adjust every few years