Hi there, We ended up with a workspace that manages around 10’000 resources. As expected, our terraform plan became super slow. However, my question is about a strange call pattern. When we looked at the trace logs, we noticed that, instead of sending all requests in a manner consistently bounded …

References: Tf plan stucks on Refreshing state - #3 by b10s Seeing very bad performance when for_each ~3k resources

References: Terraform with large set of resources take very long time to run · Issue #18981 · hashicorp/terraform · GitHub Dependency Graph | Terraform | HashiCorp Developer

Here’s an example of a “graph” message we can see: [2025-07-16T21:57:51.956000] 2025-07-16T21:57:50.116Z [TRACE] Executing graph transform *terraform.OrphanResourceInstanceCountTransformer [2025-07-16T21:57:51.956000] 2025-07-16T21:57:50.116Z [TRACE] Completed graph transform *terraform.OrphanResou…

Hi @linouk23 , It is certainly possible that Terraform is making all those calls in the 5-10 min bursts shown in the graph, while doing some other processing in between. While 10k resource instances on it’s own isn’t a necessarily problem if you are willing to wait for all the API calls required, it…

The root cause turned out to be an import block and the terraform behavior of evaluating both sides of a ternary expression: import { for_each = var.flag ? { ...some expression evaluating non-empty... } : {} … } Even when var.flag was false, terraform still evaluated the imports for the non-em…

Unusual API Call Patterns When Managing Over 10,000 Resources in a Single Workspace

Terraform

linouk23 July 17, 2025, 7:21pm 3

References:

Tf plan stucks on Refreshing state - #3 by b10s
Seeing very bad performance when for_each ~3k resources

Topic		Replies	Views
Terraform plan taking long time Terraform	8	25323	June 9, 2022
Troubleshooting Slowdown AWS	1	489	August 6, 2020
AWS API throttling and Terraform behaviour AWS	0	1519	April 20, 2023
Profiling terraform execution Terraform	5	1454	March 14, 2024
Are resources created concurrently with for_each meta-argument? Terraform	2	193	October 29, 2024

Unusual API Call Patterns When Managing Over 10,000 Resources in a Single Workspace

Related topics