wdesert•2mo ago

Am I expected to stop seeing subflow steps with lifetime.delete_after_use = true in the parent flow?

We are using Windmill 1.502.2. To avoid writing too much data unnecessarily to the DB disk, I enabled lifetime.delete_after_use for several steps of one of the subflows. Based on the description, however, I thought that I wouldn't even be able to see any args or results in these steps of the flow. I still can see them, which makes me wonder whether my expectation is correct. I assumed that maybe we should enable that in the parent flow instead, but editing a subflow's steps isn't possible. Thanks!

8 Replies

rubenf•2mo ago

would you have a minimal reproduction you could share with us?

wdesertOP•2mo ago

I'm afraid that it's very hard to do without sharing the whole pipeline, If you happen to have literally 3-5 minutes, I would be happy to show on a quick call I believe there is nothing fancy in the setup though. There's a pretty large flow with a bunch of calls to subflows. One of the subflows has really large args and results so I edited the subflow and changed the lifetime parameter. Looking at the completed runs of the parent flow, however, I still see that those steps show their args and results in the UI, which makes me think that they didn't get deleted from the DB

rubenf•2mo ago

Understood but could you maybe reproduce on a fresh new flow that have a similar topology as the flow with the issue? you could make fake inline scripts everywhere easier to debug with a reproduction

wdesertOP•2mo ago

Okay, I will try to do that and share with you

rubenf•2mo ago

thank you!

wdesertOP•2mo ago

Hi! I know it might take some time to reproduce the issue and fix (if it gets confirmed), but for now is there any workaround you can think of? The thing is, the steps with huge args keeps writing gigabytes of data per day, and not being able to discard the args in a subflow's steps is pretty unfortunate

rubenf•2mo ago

I'm not sure right now but will probably have something by early next week

wdesertOP•2mo ago

Cool, thanks a lot! As a manual workaround, I can run the query below:

update v2_job
set args = '{}'::jsonb
where created_by like '%whh_or_prod%'
and created_at::date = '2025-07-07'
and runnable_path like '%f/subflows/or_positions_by_domain_kw_list_date/loop%'

update v2_job
set args = '{}'::jsonb
where created_by like '%whh_or_prod%'
and created_at::date = '2025-07-07'
and runnable_path like '%f/subflows/or_positions_by_domain_kw_list_date/loop%'

This will at least make the space reusable and stop data exhaustion, but my question is do you think it will not have any negative impact on the instance?

Am I expected to stop seeing subflow steps with lifetime.delete_after_use = true in the parent flow?

Did you find this page helpful?