Is it recommended to use Delay on scale?

[Thomas]

Hey community,

I’m currently building a workflow to automatically an SMS to customers when the order status changes in the database.
Most status updates are just simple messages sent to the customer (e.g. “Your order is being processed”, “Your order is handled by the manufacturer”, etc.).

But at the very end of the customer journey, we’ll send the customer a notification that the order is ready to be picked up including a link to book an appointment for the pick up.

If the customer does not book an appointment using the link within 5 days, we’ll send the customer another SMS with the same booking link. If the customer still does not book an appointment after the next 5 days, we’ll create a task in Notion for a customer support agent to call the customer manually.

The workflow trigger is a Webhook which is called once an order status changes in our order DB.

Now, I’m curious if you would advise to use the Delay action to wait for 5 days multiple times in the same workflow.
We are planning to host activepieces ourselves and I’m a bit worried that if we use the Delay action on scale (e.g. 1000 webhook triggers every day), that it would lead to inefficient resource consumption.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this!
Thanks a lot in advance!

[ashrafsam]

Short answer: Yes, Delays work perfectly well.

When you delay a flow for days rather than seconds or few minutes, we will pause the flow and it will be returned to the execution queue until the promised time comes again. Only then, we’ll pull it again and run the remaining part of it.

So, any paused runs are not consuming computation power while they’re paused.

[Thomas]

Awesome, thanks a lot for the quick answer!