Symptoms

When opening K2 Workspace, the page loads but the worklist items do not load. This is intermittent when accessing one server in the K2 farm and always happens when accessing the other K2 server.
 

Diagnoses

After running a command in PowerShell to access worklist items via the K2 API, there were no results (command stopped responding and never returned any values). Which means that K2 somehow cannot retrieve a list of worklist items for the user or it could be because all thread pools are being used. After increasing the thread pool amount in K2Server.setup to a ridiculous number like 60, it started working again.

 

Resolution

It turned out to be both issues above. There was a process that was designed to be run infinitely (not infinite loop, it just never ends because it restarts after a set escalation). This process had a state size of more than 6MB which resulted in the K2 servers in the farm taking hours to open/start it and that also took up all the threads in the thread pool.

However, when this started happening the first time around, they have hard reset their one K2 server which was probably writing some data to SQL during that time. This resulted in a table becoming corrupt, specifically the table called Server.WorklistHeader - which contains all the worklist items currently active for users. The table was 9GB in size but only contained something like 2700 entries (which is unrealistically high). When the K2 server started reacting again (after increasing the thread pool count), K2 managed to recover and the table became accessible again, which resulted in the K2 Workspace starting to work again.

The SQL DBAs were involved as well, searching for some obvious corruption on the table (and other tables in the K2 DB, specifically the hServer].

• tables) so this is also a recommended step.