Workflow status shows - Due to heavy load, the latest workflow operation has been queued

Question

I recently migrated my MOSS 2007 custom approval workflow to SharePoint 2010, I initiated multiple workflows in quick succession. I get this very often. But it disappears after few minutes and workflow proceeds normally. i did not have any problem in my MOSS 2007 application.

Note: Due to heavy load, the latest workflow operation has been queued. It will attempt to resume at a later time.

I disabled the workflow auto clean up timer job as we had a data retention policy.

Is there any configuration change required at central admin level?

Answer 1

During our upgrade from 07 to 10, we had a few bumps with workflows - mainly that they wouldn't behave as they used to. Since these we pretty vanilla OOB workflows, I'd just recreate them and delete the MOSS workflows.

Few things to keep in mind: If multiple workflows are being initiated on the same site within a small amount of time, the workflow may "clock" in the browser as well as queue up on the back-end, which is what you're experiencing. Initiating too many workflows in a short amount of time may cause a delay in the sending of the first email notifications to participants.

Additionally in my experience, with multiple workflow-events happening at the same time, it is possible that workflow participants may not get all the workflow-events.