Understanding activity retries

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1

Hi there,

I have to predict the duration of a workflow where the duration depends on some user-provided parameters, at first I’ll average between best and worst case.
In order to be able to compute the worst case, I need to take into account the max activity duration, retries included.

let’s say I have the following activity options:

ao := workflow.ActivityOptions{
	StartToCloseTimeout:    time.Minute,
	ScheduleToStartTimeout: time.Minute,
	HeartbeatTimeout:       time.Second * 2, // such a short timeout to make sample fail over very fast
	RetryPolicy: &temporal.RetryPolicy{
		InitialInterval:    time.Second,
		BackoffCoefficient: 2.0,
		MaximumAttempts:    100,
		MaximumInterval:    time.Minute,
	},
}

  1. the max duration of a single activity will be StartToCloseTimeout + ScheduleToStartTimeout although the retry policy would last more?

  2. StartToCloseTimeout is the timeout of every single execution attempt?

Thanks

2

ScheduleToStart timeout is nonretryable as such retry would be putting it back into the same task queue. I would recommend not setting it at all for the majority of situations.

StartToClose timeout is the maximum execution time for a single activity invocation.

I would recommend not setting RetryPolicy.MaximumAttempts, but rely on ScheduleToClose timeout which limits total time activity can execute including all the retries.

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