504 ActionResponseTimedOut when responding to parent flow

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a parent flow (A) which calls a child flow (B). At the end of the child flow B, I'm getting the following time out error:

ActionResponseTimedOut. The execution of template action 'Respond_to_a_PowerApp_or_flow_3' is failed: the client application timed out waiting for a response from service. This means that workflow took longer to respond than the alloted timeout value. The connection maintained between the client application and service will be closed and client application will get an HTTP status code 504 Gateway Timeout.

For testing purposes, I think we can ignore that flow A exists. Simply test running B fails in the response action.

In B, right before the response action, I have yet another child flow (C), which is really just a little loop that waits for a OneDrive file to unlock so it can be deleted. Flow C takes 6 mins to complete so then flow B complains, I believe due to the 180-second request limit being reached. This is strange to me because I'm pretty sure that in other projects I have parent flows that call child flows that take longer than 180 seconds to run and yet they don't give me this error, but maybe I'm misremembering or misunderstanding.

In any case, flow B is pretty short and quick, except for the 6-min flow C it contains. Many of the answers to this problem are "resolved" in the forums and blog posts by saying "just make your child flow quicker", but I can't really speed up flow C as it waits for the file to unlock. Even if I could optimize it a bit, I don't think I could ever get it down to 180 secs. Ideally, I would just increase the 180-sec limit but since that's probably not possible, I'm looking for other solutions.

Different options I would hate to have to implement:

• Move the file deletion (flow C) into the parent flow (flow A), but that would be breaking up flow B kind of illogically.
• Simply resign myself to this error and expect this 504 to come from flow B. In flow A I could have some exception handling, but that just feels like a bad workaround and if I ever review the logs for B, I would consistently see failed attempts.
• In flow B, move the invocation of flow C after the response action. However, that would give flow A the impression that everything has worked well, when in reality I would have no confirmation that the file deletion in B has completed successfully.
• In flow C, I see that the loop which takes 6 mins allows for flow C to respond to B without this timeout issue. I suppose this is due to the difference between a loop taking 6 mins vs. a child flow taking 6 mins, an example of a single request taking this long vs a flow taking this long. The solution would therefore be to forget flow C and simply recreate the loop in B, but it's a shame to duplicate code.

Does anybody have any recommendations? Perhaps I am misunderstanding something about these limits but, as it stands right now, this just feels like yet another headache that Power Automate imposes when trying to develop bots.

Thanks

[JJDB]

I have a similar problem, I have a flow that add many element to a Sharepoint list, the flow is trigger from a Excel VBA macro using an HTTP connector. At the end, the flow send back a message to a Excel VBA macro. Nevertheless the flow usualy add many element and the "Response HTTP" action send an timeout error code 504.

Does anybody know how to change the timeout limit for the "Response" action.

Thanks

Juan Jose Descailleaux