temporalio / temporalio/temporal
Flush transient ActivityTaskStarted events before closing a workflow
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Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
On the attached screenshot you can find a workflow execution history that
- Is Closed - the workflow execution timed out
- An activity was started and was never finished, taking too much time. [Irrelevant, but In reality, an activity worker was killed and the activity had too long start_to_close timeout] Which caused the time out.
This history doesn't have an ActivityTaskStarted at all.
The reason is that we delay or buffer ActivityTaskStarted events till completion. Presumably to simplify processing of our state machine.
The problem is that this history looks like the activity was never ever picked up by the worker. Which makes this history very misleading and hard to debug.
Describe the solution you'd like
Flush buffered ActivityTaskStarted events before closing the workflow [completion, termination, cancellation, timeout]
Describe alternatives you've considered
Temporal may utilize marker events, but this is cumbersome if the original solution is possible.
Additional context

Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by tracing the workflow execution history handling for buffered ActivityTaskStarted events and the paths that close a workflow by completion, termination, cancellation, or timeout. Reproduce the activity-worker timeout scenario and verify that the buffered event is present before the workflow is closed.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- go
- Domain
- distributed-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100