Workflow Timer Job and Nintex WF

Kevin Nguyen 101 Reputation points
2021-01-13T06:59:13.52+00:00

Hi,

My question is about the Timer Job "Workflow".

I have some Nintex Workflows which are set to be executed immediatly and I'm aware that all WF (nintex's includes) are pushed into a queue.

My default Workflow Timer Job is set to be executed every 5 min.

Question : Does it mean that my queue will be empty every 5 min so that all my WF are executed ?

I tested on my 3 tier farm, and my nintex WF are executed immediatly and not when the Workflow Timer Job is executed.

Question : What is the link between Workflow Timer Job and the delay of execution of Nintex WF ?

Thanks

SharePoint Server
SharePoint Server
A family of Microsoft on-premises document management and storage systems.
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SharePoint Workflow
SharePoint Workflow
SharePoint: A group of Microsoft Products and technologies used for sharing and managing content, knowledge, and applications.Workflow: An orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity, enabling data transformation, service provision, and information retrieval.
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Accepted answer
  1. Jerry Xu-MSFT 7,941 Reputation points
    2021-01-14T03:15:32.61+00:00

    Hi, @Kevin Nguyen ,

    To say it short , SharePoint attempts to run Workflows synchronously. When the farm is experiencing a heavy load, say, the number of workflows exceeds 15 per content database (it is a default setting which can be tuned), the workflows will be converted to SPWorkItems and queued. This queue is then handled by the Workflow Timer Job, which runs every 5 minutes by default. The workflow Timer Job is ran by SharePoint Timer Service and by default will be triggered every 5 minutes as you mention. It will tries to run the work items later .

    The workflow SPTimer job fires to process pending workflow tasks. This 5 minutes interval also represents the granularity of delay timers within your workflow. If a timer is set to delay for one minute, but the interval timer fires only every five minutes, the workflow delays for five minutes, not one minute.

    Reference:https://www.softlanding.ca/blog/tuning-sharepoint-workflow-engine/#:~:text=library%2Fgg508755.aspx-,Summary,every%205%20minutes%20by%20default.

    Workflows, by their very nature, do not execute in a nonstop, linear fashion. Instead, they run for a little while, pause, run some more, and then pause again, continuing in this manner until the process is complete.

    More detailed information about the process, please refer to this article: https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/sharepoint-services/dd441390(v=office.12)?redirectedfrom=MSDN#WorkflowScalabilityPerformance_HardwareSoftwareConfig

    https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/sharepoint-server-2010/gg508755(v=office.14)?redirectedfrom=MSDN

    And Nintex workflow is out of the scope of this forum, I am not certain if the mechanism of default workflow can be applied to Nintex ones, still you can take them as a reference.

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