Auto-Suspend: The Quick Win for Snowflake Cost Savings

Setting aggressive auto-suspend timeouts (60 seconds or less) can reduce idle warehouse costs by up to 40%. Learn how to configure this without impacting performance.

The Problem

When a warehouse sits idle, you're still paying for compute resources you're not using. Many organizations default to 10-minute or even longer auto-suspend timeouts, worrying about startup time. However, Snowflake warehouses resume in just 1-2 seconds, making this concern largely unfounded for most workloads.

The Solution

Set auto-suspend to 60 seconds or less for most warehouses. This ensures that the moment query activity stops, you stop paying for compute within a minute.

Implementation

ALTER WAREHOUSE <warehouse_name> SET AUTO_SUSPEND = 60;

Best Practices

Development/testing warehouses: 30-60 seconds
Production ETL warehouses: 60-120 seconds
Interactive BI warehouses: 60-180 seconds
Ad-hoc analysis warehouses: 30-60 seconds

Real-World Example

A mid-sized company with 5 warehouses running 24/7 with 10-minute auto-suspend was paying for approximately 120 hours of idle compute per day. By reducing auto-suspend to 60 seconds, they cut idle time to under 10 hours per day, saving over $15,000 monthly.

Key Takeaways

Auto-suspend of 60 seconds or less is safe for most workloads
Snowflake warehouse resume time is 1-2 seconds
Monitor usage patterns and adjust as needed
This single change can reduce costs by 30-40%

Auto-Suspend: The Quick Win for Snowflake Cost Savings