Does terminationGracePeriodSeconds have max value?

zergppp · April 8, 2025, 10:13am

Hi everyone,
Does terminationGracePeriodSeconds has a max value? Can’t find it in documentation.
If yes - what is the value?

Thanks

jayeshmahajan · April 10, 2025, 2:41am

Yes and No both.

Yes, terminationGracePeriodSeconds does have a practical maximum value, although it might not be explicitly stated as a hard limit in the official Kubernetes API documentation.

Integer Limit: The terminationGracePeriodSeconds field in the Kubernetes API is typically stored as an integer. Therefore, the absolute theoretical maximum would be the maximum value of an integer type in the Go language used by Kubernetes (likely int64). So technically k8s do not have default value as limit but its default max for int64 from Golang. This would be a very large number (around 263−1), representing an impractical amount of time.

terminationGracePeriodSeconds to an extremely large value (greater than 253−1) could lead to pods hanging indefinitely in the Terminating state and potentially making nodes NotReady. This suggests that while the API might accept a very large integer, the underlying implementation can have issues with excessively long values.

Due to this reason some of the cloud prvoider may have limits setup e.g. in case of GKE Auto pilot I believe have 10 mins.

github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes

staging/src/k8s.io/api/core/v1/types.go

master


      
          	// The grace period is the duration in seconds after the processes running in the pod are sent
          	// a termination signal and the time when the processes are forcibly halted with a kill signal.
          	// Set this value longer than the expected cleanup time for your process.
          	// If this value is nil, the pod's terminationGracePeriodSeconds will be used. Otherwise, this
          	// value overrides the value provided by the pod spec.
          	// Value must be non-negative integer. The value zero indicates stop immediately via
          	// the kill signal (no opportunity to shut down).
          	// This is a beta field and requires enabling ProbeTerminationGracePeriod feature gate.
          	// Minimum value is 1. spec.terminationGracePeriodSeconds is used if unset.
          	// +optional
          	TerminationGracePeriodSeconds *int64 `json:"terminationGracePeriodSeconds,omitempty" protobuf:"varint,7,opt,name=terminationGracePeriodSeconds"`
          }
          
          // PullPolicy describes a policy for if/when to pull a container image
          // +enum
          type PullPolicy string
          
          const (
          	// PullAlways means that kubelet always attempts to pull the latest image. Container will fail If the pull fails.
          	PullAlways PullPolicy = "Always"
          	// PullNever means that kubelet never pulls an image, but only uses a local image. Container will fail if the image isn't present

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Does terminationGracePeriodSeconds have max value?

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