During the past year, we have again worked hard to improve your experience on our platform. A part of this improvement concerns actions, in which we have made a huge step by releasing NextGen actions. A less observable part has been our work on performance and stability. We have achieved some great results there, but we do need to take another step, which is distributing activities on the server better and more fairly. As we have communicated via several channels (for example in this blog) we need to enforce stricter limits regarding action duration. We have previously communicated that we would enforce a 1 hour limit on the action duration as per October 2022. However, we’ve seen that the impact of enforcing this limit would have been too big for some clients, so to accommodate these clients we decided to postpone this enforcement.
To minimize the impact for you, as a client, we’ve now decided to enforce this limit in 2 new steps. The first step will be taken on Wednesday 18 January. The background action duration for applications will be limited to 1 hour for the NL3 and NL4 zones, 10 minutes for the US2 and CA3 zones, with exemptions. We will enforce app-specific limitations in case the application has an action which took more than the respective limit during the past month. In that case, we will enforce a limit of the longest action duration + 20%. This should provide you enough room to keep using your actions as they are, until the next step will be taken. On the other hand, it should also prevent new (inefficient) actions being built.
This second step will be taken on 1 April 2023. The background action duration limit will be set to 1 hour for the NL3 and NL4 zones, 10 minutes for the US2 and CA3 zones, for all applications. This means that if you have an action which (potentially) takes over an hour to complete, you need to take action now! We understand that this might be challenging to deal with, but we hope you understand that in the end you, as a client, will benefit from this and that we have carefully considered the options to attain the desired result.
You can easily check this by going to <my-app>.bettyblocks.com/monitoring/actions. Then click on the maximum execution time to sort it and divide the highest amount(s) by 3600 to see the duration in hours. If it is above or close to 1 hour? Your action is in the danger zone and you have to take action. Usually these actions process a lot of data. As per 1 April 2023, the action will automatically stop after the respective limit and you will get an error in the application logs that the action has stopped.
If you want optimal results, we advise you to make use of our Next-Gen actions, using app functions with ‘many’-mutations. In many cases this should enable you to build actions which only take seconds.
The other option which is applicable for most use cases, is optimizing your action by splitting your actions into batches, following this documentation. The time investment of adding this logic to your action is often limited, but the impact is big. This option might result in a total action duration longer than an hour, but as long as your separate (sub)actions run less than an hour, you’re good.
We will be continuously monitoring the results of this limit closely and expect to see improvements on action performance and stability. This should also lead to improved performance and stability in related platform components. The results will be evaluated to see if this limit is strict enough to provide the performance and stability we want to provide. We might deem it necessary to enforce a 10 minute limit on the background action duration for the NL3 and NL4 zones as well. Please keep this in mind when you’ll be rebuilding your actions.
You could have a look at our Action Duration FAQ page on our community. Our team and partners are also here to help if you have a specific use case and need support through it. Together we can take a look at how your use case can be tailored to your specific needs. So don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts for more info!
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