Does changing retry policy break existing workflows

Community Support
1

I have a workflow with an activity that has a retry policy with parameters that cause it to retry for several hours which is what we want. There are several thousand workflows at any given time in the retry state.

If I want to change the activity retry policy to shorten the time it can retry, will this break the workflows that are running in a retry state? Or will they pick up the new policy and likely end because of the shortened interval?

So specifically, I want to change this to the settings below without breaking any workflows in progress.

var internalRetryPolicy = temporal.RetryPolicy{
	InitialInterval:    1 * time.Second,
	BackoffCoefficient: 2,
	MaximumInterval:    30 * time.Second,
	MaximumAttempts:    360,
}

var internalRetryPolicy = temporal.RetryPolicy{
	InitialInterval:    1 * time.Second,
	BackoffCoefficient: 2,
	MaximumInterval:    30 * time.Second,
	MaximumAttempts:    10,
}
2

Changing retry policy would not break determinism of your executions. The new policy would be picked up by new executions or existing ones which have not yet executed this activity. Note the update would not apply to running executions that are currently retrying this activity.
One thing you could do for now could be from activity code to get the retry attempt count and if its > 10 return a non-retryable application failure that would fail the activity.

There is a feature request here that could help.