The 10 minute timeout issue

[Papageno]

I’ve noticed a peculiar behaviour and after some googling, I realize I’m not the only one. However, I can’t get a clear confirmation so I’ll try to get it here.

When I start a flow that runs for more than 10 minutes from the dev environment using the Test button, I always get a timeout after 10 minutes.

But the flow is still running and will probably complete if I just wait. Is this by default and can I really trust this in a production environment?

Here’s an example to demonstrate:

This is my setup:

• Recurrence trigger.
• Start and wait for an approval.
• Condition to determine the Outcome. (Both Yes and No fires an email to notify of the result)

My Recurrence trigger is set to fire once a month. I start the flow manually in the dev environment to test the flow.

Now the issue: When I start this flow, it sends an email to the assignee with an approval request as expected. However, I do nothing, just wait. After 10 minutes it times out:

This is the confusing part: The flow has obviously timed out, but when I click the arrow on the top left to go back to the previous page I find that it’s still running:

So I open the email to the assignee and make the approval. Lo and behold, the flow continues to run to the end and exits gracefully. The final step, Send an email (the Yes branch), is executed and the mail is sent.

The flow is now reported as Succeded.

I know I’m not the first one to point this out, but I haven’t found an explanation to this. Can anyone explain and can you really trust this?

[yashag2255 · Accepted solution]

Hey @Papageno 

It is not just with the approvals type actions but almost any flow that takes more than 10 minutes will show as timed out when you do the test flow thing. This has been reported a couple of times as a bug and should be addressed soon. 

Rest assured that there is no actual issue behind this and it is trust worthy for the Prod environments. (I have a couple of those running and they take hours to copy data across services and they just work fine an have similar behavior when I hit the test flow button. )

Hope this Helps!

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[Papageno]

I know that this issue isn't just for approvals, but an approval flow was a good way to illustrate the problem.

Anyway, I finally got an answer to this question. This has been bugging me a lot lately. Thanks!