To Nha Notes | April 6, 2023, 4:11 p.m.
Warehouses can be set to automatically suspend when there’s no activity after a specified period of time. Auto-suspend is enabled by specifying the time period (minutes, hours, etc.) of inactivity for the warehouse.
We recommend setting auto-suspend according to your workload and your requirements for warehouse availability:
If you enable auto-suspend, we recommend setting it to a low value (e.g. 5 or 10 minutes or less) because Snowflake utilizes per-second billing. This will help keep your warehouses from running (and consuming credits) when not in use.
However, the value you set should match the gaps, if any, in your query workload. For example, if you have regular gaps of 2 or 3 minutes between incoming queries, it doesn’t make sense to set auto-suspend to 1 or 2 minutes because your warehouse will be in a continual state of suspending and resuming (if auto-resume is also enabled) and each time it resumes, you are billed for the minimum credit usage (i.e. 60 seconds).
You might want to consider disabling auto-suspend for a warehouse if:
You have a heavy, steady workload for the warehouse.
You require the warehouse to be available with no delay or lag time. Warehouse provisioning is generally very fast (e.g. 1 or 2 seconds); however, depending on the size of the warehouse and the availability of compute resources to provision, it can take longer.
Important
If you chose to disable auto-suspend, please carefully consider the costs associated with running a warehouse continually, even when the warehouse is not processing queries. The costs can be significant, especially for larger warehouses (X-Large, 2X-Large, etc.).
To disable auto-suspend, you must explicitly select Never in the web interface, or specify 0 or NULL in SQL.
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/warehouses-considerations#automating-warehouse-suspension