The Breaker node caps how many times a loop can repeat. It is what turns a retry into something that finishes.
How the count works
You set a number of repeats. The flow may pass through the Breaker that many times. On the next arrival, the Breaker stops it.
Set it to 2 and the flow goes through twice. The third time it arrives, the run stops there.
So the number is how many passes you allow, not how many times it may loop back. With a loop that asks an advertiser for a status, a Breaker set to 6 means six questions asked.
What stopping means
The run ends at the Breaker. Nothing further happens on that branch, no End node is reached, and no result is written.
That has a consequence worth planning for: those leads are neither approved nor rejected. They are simply unresolved. Decide what you want to do with them, because nothing will happen to them on its own.
Other branches are unaffected. Only the branch that hit the Breaker stops.
Choosing the limit
Work backwards from how long the advertiser realistically takes, then divide by your Wait.
- Answers within minutes: a Breaker of 3 with a Wait of one minute.
- Answers within a day: a Breaker of 6 with a Wait of four hours.
- Answers within a week: a Breaker of 6 with a Wait of a day.
Add a little margin, but not much. Every extra attempt is another request to the advertiser’s API for a lead that is looking less likely with each one.
Why you always want one
A loop without a Breaker does not run forever, but the way it ends is worse than stopping cleanly. PalDock allows a single node to run at most thirty times within one run, and past that the whole run fails with an error.
An error is meant to mean something broke. A lead the advertiser never got round to deciding on has not broken anything, and you do not want the two mixed together in your logs.
In a pingtree there is a second reason. A loop that keeps going holds up the channel, and the pingtree cannot move on to the next advertiser while it waits.
Common mistakes
- No Breaker at all, so the loop ends in an error instead of a decision.
- A limit set without looking at the Wait. The two only mean something together.
- Forgetting about the leads that hit the limit. They stay unresolved until you go looking for them.
