In Posit Workbench, there are a number of session states which identify the current status of a session. A session in a pending state means that the session has been initiated and is pending a response from the server. A session can then go into the "Active" state when a developer initiates a workflow or a series of processes, indicating that the execution of these processes is currently ongoing. The session can then transition to the "Finished" state once all the processes have been completed successfully, indicating that the execution of these processes is complete.
However, sometimes a session may go directly to the "Finished" state instead of the "Active" state. This can happen if the workflow or processes that the user initiated were very quick and completed almost instantly. In such cases, the session might transition directly to the "Finished" state without ever entering the "Active" state. The table below highlights the differences between states:
| State | Definition |
| Idle | The session is idle and not performing any code execution |
| Pending | A session has been initiated and is waiting for a response from the server |
| Active | A user has initiated a workflow on the session |
| Suspended | A session has been suspended and it is not using any compute capacity on the server |
| Finished | All processes have been completed successfully |
| Failed | The session has failed to start |
The other statuses such as Suspend and Resume only apply to R sessions - it's not possible to suspend Jupyter and VScode sessions at this time.