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Unpause an Activity

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Unpause resumes a Paused Activity Execution.

When to Unpause​

  • The downstream service or dependency that caused you to Pause has recovered.
  • A code deploy or configuration change is complete and the Activity is safe to retry.
  • You Paused an Activity for investigation and are ready to let it proceed.

What happens when you Unpause an Activity​

  • The Activity is rescheduled immediately. Any remaining retry backoff is discarded. The next execution starts right away.
  • Attempt count, Heartbeat details, and timeouts are preserved. The Activity resumes from where it left off. Use Reset to restart from attempt 1.

Unpause is idempotent. Unpausing an Activity that isn't Paused has no effect. Unpausing an Activity that has already completed returns an error.

CLI usage​

temporal activity unpause \
  --workflow-id my-workflow \
  --activity-id my-activity

To target a Standalone Activity, omit --workflow-id:

temporal activity unpause \
  --activity-id my-activity

See the CLI reference for temporal activity unpause for all options.

Important considerations​

  • Unpausing many Activities at once can overwhelm downstream services. If you Paused multiple Activities because a service was down, Unpausing them all at the same time sends all retries simultaneously. Consider Unpausing in batches to avoid overwhelming a recovering service.
  • Unpausing doesn't override Workflow Pause. If the parent Workflow is also Paused, Unpausing the Activity alone isn't enough. Both must be Unpaused before the Activity resumes. See Interaction with Workflow Pause.
  • Unpausing doesn't reset the attempt count. The Activity retries from its current attempt number. Use Reset to restart from attempt 1.
  • A Paused Activity can time out before you Unpause it. The Schedule-To-Close Timeout isn't stopped or extended while Paused. Use update-options to extend the timeout before Unpausing if needed.
  • Unpause doesn't interrupt or duplicate an in-flight execution. If an Activity without Heartbeat is still running when you Unpause, it continues to completion. The Temporal Service doesn't schedule a concurrent execution. If the in-flight execution fails, the next retry proceeds normally.