Hey @slb,
cockpit does not have a live view of the processes. Generally this is not the goal of cockpit, as it is mostly used to monitor and analyse problems in the processes. That’s usually when it is stuck somewhere 
Cockpit only shows what is persisted in the Database. The state of the process is only persisted in the database once we hit an async-continuation (e.g. at user tasks, external service tasks or manually set async cont.). If the process is in the middle of a synchronous sequence of tasks, this could not be displayed even with auto-refresh.
I hope this clears things up a bit