temporalio / temporalio/sdk-java

Excessive retries in test workflow environment

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#626 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Java
Stars
433
Forks
249
Avg merge
5d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
26

Description

When testing an activity that constantly fails (cannot recover from the failure) and has a large scheduleToClose timeout set (like days/months), or does not have one set at all
the testing framework will keep retrying in some cases thousands of times.

Asking to add a feature that in those edge cases to not retry, but skip time so the excessive retries are avoided in tests.

To reproduce you can have a workflow which calls a single activity with activity options setScheduleToCloseTimeout set to 5 days for example. Set the activity to fail with for example:
throw Activity.wrap(new Exception("oops"));

in test you will see that it performs over 4K retries before timing out.

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the issue in the testing framework with a workflow calling one activity, a five-day schedule-to-close timeout, and an activity that throws Activity.wrap(new Exception("oops")). Trace the retry and time-skipping behavior, then verify that the excessive retries are avoided while the test still reaches its timeout outcome.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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