Question about StartToCloseTimeout for unpredictable task duration

[Manticore_ID]

Hi Everyone,

i have been learning to understand the concept of temporal, im still not clear about StartToCloseTimeout, for example, i have video encoding job, that the duration is depending to the video size based on user upload, would it be a good idea to change StartToCloseTimeout based on file size or video duration ?

Thank You

[Manticore_ID]

This might be the solution:

Best way to support a long-running Activity without running into an Activity Timeout Error?

Workflow timeouts are not related to activity timeouts in any way. So don’t change them for this use case. You want to specify a long (the longest possible activity execution) StartToCloseTimeout. And then a short HeartbeatTimeout (let’s say 1 minute). If heartbeat timeout is specified the activity must heartbeat periodically with a heartbeat interval that is lower than the heartbeat timeout. This way an activity can execute for a long time and fail fast. See this presentation that explains th…

[maxim]

Correct, a long StartToClose timeout with a much shorter HeartbeatTimeout is the answer for long running activities with unpredictable duration.