Can Query be used to fetch the state of workflow in near real time?

Community Support
1

Hi,

I am new to temporal. Let’s say there are millions of workflows running or dormant in temporal. Each workflow has some enum X which is updated via some signals in the workflow.
Can the Query method be wrapped as API to expose the enum state X of a workflow, directly to the end user, given there are 1000s of requests per second? Can temporal serve responses to 1000s of queries per second in real time?

Also, a different question- Can new query methods be added to a workflow without versioning?

2

It can be if the query request rate to a single workflow is not too high. Temporal scales out with the number of workflow executions.

3

Thanks for taking out time.
Follow up- What should the rate limit be, per workflow, for this to work? Are there any better alternatives to serve this use case?

4

I think you don’t want to go over a few requests per second. What is your use case? Frequent polling through a query is usually an anti-pattern.

5

You can add query methods without versioning.

6

Use Case- Each User has a respective workflow running with a enum State X with values {A, B , C}. Would like to expose this X value to his/her app dashboard. Query rate per single workflow would be worst case 1 per 15 secs.

7

This sounds like a reasonable use for the query. In the future, we might add the long poll query that would block a request until a state change to reduce churn.