QUESTION
What is the timer service?ANSWER
Timer jobs perform infrastructure tasks for the timer service, such as clearing the timer job history and recycling the timer service, and tasks for Wep Applications, such as sending e-mail alerts. A timer job contains a definition of the service to run and specifies how frequently the service is started. The SharePoint 2010 Timer service (SPTimerv4) runs timer jobs. Many features in SharePoint Server rely on timer jobs to run services according to a schedule. All delay actions utilize the SharePoint timer service. If there is a greater issue with this service it can affect any action that utilizes delays. The effect on these actions might be they do not continue at the expected time, or they never continue.The following actions may be affected:
- Pause For
- Pause until
- Task reminder
- Complete Workflow task
- Delegate workflow task
- Wait for item update
- Loop (when Safe Looping is enabled)
- State Machine (when Safe Looping is enabled)
