Wait

The Wait node pauses the flow, then lets it continue. You use it when the other side needs time before it can answer, and when a retry loop should leave a gap between attempts.

How long

You set the delay in seconds, minutes or hours. The maximum is one year.

What the pause actually does

This is the part worth understanding, because a Wait behaves differently depending on whether anyone is waiting for the answer.

• In a background flow, the pause costs nothing. The run is put down and picked up again when the time is up. A Wait of twelve hours before checking a lead’s status is perfectly normal.

• In a flow that runs while someone waits, such as an integration in a pingtree, a short pause genuinely holds everything up. The customer sits on the loading screen for exactly as long as you set.

The dividing line is around fifty seconds. Below that, the flow simply stops and waits, and the customer waits with it. Above that, PalDock releases the flow instead of holding the line open, and picks it up later in the background.

That sounds convenient, but it means the answer arrives long after the customer has gone. A long Wait in a pingtree is not a way to give an advertiser more time, it is a way to lose the sale. See Limits and timeouts.

Waiting in a loop

The usual pattern is: ask, and if the answer is not final yet, wait and ask again.

Get status  →  still pending  →  Breaker  →  Wait  →  back to Get status

Always put a Breaker in that loop. Without one the flow keeps going round until it hits a system limit and fails with an error, which tells you nothing useful about the lead.

Set the delay and the Breaker limit together, because what matters is the total. Six attempts twenty-four hours apart covers a week. Six attempts a minute apart covers six minutes, which is not long enough for anything a human has to look at.

Common mistakes

• A Wait in a pingtree with no thought for the customer. Every second is a second they are staring at a loading screen.
• A loop with no Breaker. It runs until it errors out.
• A delay that is too short for the advertiser. If they take a day to decide, asking again in five minutes just wastes six requests and ends with nothing.