Hey! I've task that is scheduled to run every 4 hours. However sometimes the associated agent isn't running for let's say a day. In that case the pending runs obviously pile up. I'd like to avoid that, especially because there is no point running that many runs the next day. I can imagine 3 ways to implement such behavour, unfortunately I didn't find anything in the docs so far: 1. set a limit of pending runs of a given fllow 2. timeout a pending run after some time 3. add a task to the flow that checks the scheduled time and skips the actual task if above some threshold I assume 1 and 2 are not available. 3 should be possible somehow. Any pointers on how to implement this?

Hi Wolfgang — #2 will be available as a feature on the standard tier in the next week or two. In the meantime, you can implement #3 by using

prefect.context["scheduled_start_time"]

to perform your task check, which is a datetime object representing the scheduled start time for the flow run

We have a similar issue and followed the advice Chris laid out to fix it. Our initial task in the flow has a max_late timedelta set, and within the task we run this:

from prefect.engine.signals import SKIP

if prefect.context["scheduled_start_time"] + max_late < datetime.datetime.now(tz=pytz.utc):
    raise SKIP("Task is too late, skipping")

Cool! Thank you guys. I'll try Samuel's code snippet for now and looking forward to have "run timeouts" available soon