Control / flow · All operations

Pause for a set time

A variant of Branch or loop

Hold the run or each row for a fixed time before carrying on.

Status

In arcform

Not built yet

arcform does not do this yet; it would live in how a Protocol runs. Its place on the roadmap

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 95.7% of 324 rows (variant, version 3).

Apache Hop (2)
  • Delay rowread 2026-09-27

    Pause for a set time before passing each row on

  • Wait forread 2026-09-27

    Pause the workflow for a set time

Azure Data Factory (1)
Duckle (1)
  • Wait / Delayread 2026-09-25

    sleep a fixed time, then pass rows through

EasyMorph (1)
  • Waitread 2026-09-27

    Pause for a given number of seconds

KNIME Analytics Platform (1)
  • Wait...read 2026-09-27

    Pause for a duration, until a time of day, or until a file is created, changed or deleted

Pentaho Data Integration (1)
  • Delay rowread 2026-09-27

    Pass each row on only after a delay

RapidMiner Studio (1)
  • Delayread 2026-09-27

    Pause process execution for a fixed or random time

Talend (1)
  • tSleepread 2026-09-27

    Pause the Job for a set time

Background

In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, sleep is a command that suspends program execution for a specified time.[1] In Azure Data Factory, the Wait activity makes the pipeline wait for a specified period of time before it runs the activities that follow.[2] Apache Hop's Delay row transform waits a set timeout before passing each input row to the next transform.[3]

When to use it

In an Azure Data Factory example, an Until loop and a Wait activity run a Web activity repeatedly, with a one-second wait between runs.[2] Apache Hop's Delay row transform is for when you deliberately want to slow down a pipeline.[3] Talend's tSleep component puts a time break in a Job, to identify possible bottlenecks when testing or tracking.[4] In exponential backoff, the pause before each retry is multiplied by a fixed amount, so a client might retry after 1 second, then 2 seconds, then 4.[5]

The Unix sleep instruction suspends the calling process for at least the specified number of seconds, minutes, hours or days.[1] A fixed pause is a guess about how long something else will take; where the thing being waited for can be checked, wait for it instead of waiting a set time. (Meridian's view)

The method

Busy waiting, or spinning, can generate an arbitrary time delay, but spinning as a time-delay technique can give inconsistent results on different systems, since processor speeds vary.[6] In most cases spinning is considered an anti-pattern, because processor time that could run a different task is wasted.[6] The sleep command first appeared in Version 4 Unix, and has been part of the X/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987.[1]

In Apache Hop's Delay row, the timeout can be a static value, a variable or a numeric field of the incoming row, and a null or empty field counts as no delay.[3] Apache Hop's Wait for action delays a workflow by a set number of seconds, minutes or hours before its next action.[7] RapidMiner's Delay operator can delay a process by a fixed amount of time or by a random amount between a minimum and a maximum.[8]

Sources

  1. [1]sleep (command) - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]Wait activity - Azure Data Factory & Azure Synapse | Microsoft Learndocumentation
  3. [3]Delay row | Apache Hopdocumentation
  4. [4]Orchestration (Integration) components | Talend Components for Jobs Helpdocumentation
  5. [5]Exponential backoff - Wikipediasecondary source
  6. [6]Busy waiting - Wikipediasecondary source
  7. [7]Wait For | Apache Hopdocumentation
  8. [8]Delay - Rapidminer Documentationdocumentation