It's 2025 and running an API workflow on a list is still not reliable?

Need help
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for the best current approach to running actions on a list. For example, I often need to send notifications to a few hundred users when a business marks a day as closed.

In my experience, API workflow on a list is unreliable. It sometimes skips recipients or ignores the second delay value. If even one user is missed, they may show up, the business hears about it, and my reputation suffers. The same issue occurs when onboarding a business’s clients via CSV, where users can be skipped at random. After being burned enough times by this feature, I now rely solely on recursive workflows for critical tasks.

Is recursive still the most effective and reliable method for this type of operation? I am concerned about scaling and want to know the best way to handle cases where I might need to notify 500 or more users without overloading the workflow.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi, scheduling API workflow on a list is reliable. Is it possible that you are encountering race conditions as you are dealing with updating a field that is a list in your workflow?

If so, try increasing the interval to one or two seconds.

3

@teamprogresscomplete API on a list is reliable (i.e. it will be run *eventually)
*
The issue with race conditions @georgecollier is that even with a short interval (e.g 1-2 seconds), scheduled workflows can be paused for the performance reasons, so even then they could be stacked and then multiple or all run when capacity is available.

For anything that relies on updates or updates another thing during the workflow execution, I would still recommend recursive workflows.

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