Auto-suspend

Neon's Auto-suspend feature controls when a Neon compute instance transitions to an Idle state (scales to zero) due to inactivity.

By default, a Neon compute instance scales to zero after 300 seconds (5 minutes) of inactivity. For Neon Free Tier users, this setting is fixed. Neon Pro Plan users can increase, decrease, or disable the Auto-suspend setting, controlling when or if a compute scales to zero.

Reasons for adjusting the Auto-suspend setting might include:

• Avoiding cold starts. Restarting a compute from an Idle state can take anywhere from 500 ms to a few seconds (see Compute lifecycle). You can turn off the Auto-suspend feature to avoid cold starts. For compute time cost information, see Billing metrics.
• Reducing the frequency of cold starts. You can configure Auto-suspend to occur less frequently, keeping your compute active during busier hours while ensuring that it suspends when usage drops off.
• Suspending a compute more quickly to reduce compute usage. Compute startup times can be as low as 500 ms, which may be sufficient for your purposes. In this case, you can suspend computes more frequently reduce compute usage.

You can configure the Auto-suspend setting in an existing project by editing a compute endpoint. You can also configure it when you first create a Neon project, which sets the Auto-suspend default for the project. For instructions, refer to Configuring Auto-suspend for Neon computes.