SharePoint Workflow stuck / takes ages to complete

Question

We have several Workflows (2013) starting when an item is created. One of these Workflows does a HTTP call to create a subsite via rest api. Many times this Workflow will take up to a day (!) to complete. One of the actions after the HTTP call is to update a field with the newly created Subsite URL. First we were thinking the API call itself was the culprit as I put an action to log something to the History right after the HTTP call and it does not log until hours afterwards. Now today I discovered that the Subsite is actually created but still the log to History is not happening and the Workflow is stuck until hours after starting it.

There are no errors in the log.

Also, there were days when the Workflow finishes in a few minutes.

Any advise on how to find out what is going on and why the Workflow takes so long most times?

Thanks Sarah

Answer 1

For anyone having similar issues: I fixed the issue. It turned out that one Timer Job was stuck in Pausing and caused one of the Servers to spike up to 100% CPU which then ultimately caused the Workflow to be stuck. Disabling the failed/stuck Timer Job and enabling it again brought Server CPU down to around 20% and Workflow has been completed in 2-3 minutes since then.

Thanks!

Answer 2

To troubleshoot the issue, check things below:

1. make sure the account who runs the workflow is in the user profile service application.

2. Re-publish the workflow and check if the same issue will occur.

3. Create a new list and create a new same workflow to check if the same issue will occur.

Answer 3

How robust is your 2013 Workflow Manager farm? Single server, shared server, multi-server? If you are running lots of workflows that maybe your bottleneck.