Suboptimal Warehouse Auto-Suspend Configuration

Simar Arora

Service Category

Compute

Cloud Provider

Snowflake

Service Name

Virtual Warehouse

Inefficiency Type

Suboptimal Configuration

Explanation

If auto-suspend settings are too high, warehouses can sit idle and continue accruing unnecessary charges. Tightening the auto-suspend window ensures that the warehouse shuts down quickly once queries complete, minimizing credit waste while maintaining acceptable user experience (e.g., caching needs, interactive performance).

Relevant Billing Model

Detection

Review auto-suspend settings for each warehouse to identify configurations with unnecessarily high idle time thresholds (e.g., exceeding 5 minutes).
Analyze query frequency and typical idle patterns to evaluate whether warehouses could be suspended sooner without materially impacting performance.
Confirm whether workloads rely heavily on caching benefits for user facing workloads, which may justify slightly longer suspend timers.
Validate proposed changes with application teams to ensure that faster auto-suspend does not introduce unacceptable query latency.

Remediation

Adjust warehouse auto-suspend settings to minimize idle billing while balancing performance needs.
For batch and non-interactive workloads, consider shorter suspend intervals (e.g., around 60 seconds), recognizing that minimum billing granularity is already 60 seconds.
For interactive workloads where query caching significantly improves performance, moderate suspend timers (e.g., up to 5 minutes) may be justified.
Communicate cache loss implications to workload owners to ensure informed decisions about suspend timing.
Periodically reassess suspend policies as workload patterns and user experience expectations evolve.

Relevant Documentation