Schedules - Delays between Tasks!

[JasonReid]

Hi All,
Can someone please advise if there is such a thing as a recommended delay time between tasks in a schedule? I understand that a wait may be used essentially to allow resources to load and be available for the next task but have been advised by our support team that a wait of 15min between each task is required to improve performance. Seems a little excessive!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[bruce.liu]

Hi Jason,

We have introduced "Post Completion Delay (secs)" option to address the issue where Blue Prism runtime resource is not able to start immediately after logging into the operation system. Based on the performance of runtimes from site to site, this number may be set differently. But 5 mins is often adopted as a starting point.

This option is rarely seen used in other situations. 

Applications associated with previous task may need to be shut down and sometimes it cannot be completed immediately. Developers would often build wait mechanism into the process to allow it to shut down gracefully. The same would also apply to clean up activities post task completion if it is entirely necessary. But Blue Prism itself does not need additional time to "allow resources to load", and I find it hard to understand the reasoning to justify a 15min wait between tasks. It will no doubt reduce your license utilisation quite significantly to be honest. 

I was wondering if your team has encountered any specific challenges in the past that may have led to this recommendation?

[JasonReid]

Hi @Bruce Liu,
Thanks for your quick reply.
The word from the support team was that this was the advice from Blue Prism to improve performance​.
When we tried it we had more issues with the next task failing to trigger after the 15min delay.
So to your knowledge increasing the delay between tasks would not improve performance and is only used to allow the resource to be in a ready state for the next task?

[bruce.liu]

Hi Jason,

There must be some miscommunication happened somewhere. I will ping you privately to clarify as it may be related to a ticket you have with us.

Just to be clear, delay between tasks is only necessary for Login Agent process. It is rather uncommon to see delays introduced between tasks in any other scenarios. I highly recommend you review this practice as it does not make a lot of sense. 

[MaxMcConchie]

We have only ever used post completion delay after Login. This ensures the runtime has enough time to get to the idle state ready for the next process as Blue Prism doesn't know to wait for a runtime that is in the process of logging in.

We have not used or been advised to use post completion delay for any other circumstance.