Ideally, you would be eating ascorbate continuously in a manner mirroring how our ascorbate production mechanism would be producing it, but living life gets in the way and we have to seek a compromise.

Plasma half life for ascorbate has been reported to be 30min. This is an extremely 'busy' little compound, so only eating ascorbate every 6 hrs would leave you with only 1/64 th of what you had eaten a 3hrs and only 1/4000 th at 6 hrs. Of course, if your body was busy killing cells and creating showers of free radicals then half life becomes moot because the free rediacals mop up the ascorbate within minutes and you run the rest of the 6hrs on empty.

If there is a golden rule for eating ascorbate, it would be:-

Little and often, and if you need more, eat it very frequently.

It is much better to eat 1g every hour and a half rather than 4g every 6 hrs. In the first case you only get down to 1/8th of a gram in your system before the next top up, in the latter case you are down to 1/8 of a gram in 2.5 hours and the remaining 3.5 hrs it just goes on getting lower and lower.

This is particularly relevant if you are sick. Bowel tolerance will limit how much you can eat at one go - sick or healthy - eat too much and you kidneys do not get a look in, it passes straight through with 'urgency'. When you need a lot of ascorbate to fight massive free radical levels, the only way to get it into your system is by eating it more frequently.

A bad cold sheds bucket loads of free radicals as the virus kills cells. By the time cold symptoms have developed, your body is ready to absorb 3g of ascorbate every 10mins for the best part of 4 hours and NONE of that 60g of ascorbate will be wasted by being thrown away. This is not conjecture. This is how all those in the know about ascorbate destroy every cold or flu they might catch.