Timers

What is a Timer?

A Workflow can set a durable timer for a fixed time period. In some SDKs, the function is called sleep(), and in others, it's called timer().

A Workflow can sleep for months. Timers are persisted, so even if your Worker or Temporal Service is down when the time period completes, as soon as your Worker and Temporal Service are back up, the sleep() call will resolve and your code will continue executing.

Sleeping is a resource-light operation: it does not tie up the process, and you can run millions of Timers off a single Worker.

To set a Timer in PHP, use Workflow::timer() and pass the number of seconds you want to wait before continuing.

The following example yields a sleep method for 5 minutes.

yield Workflow::timer(300); // sleep for 5 minutes

You cannot set a Timer invocation inside the await or awaitWithTimeout methods.