Pause for Duration appears not to be pausing?


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In my workflow I have a "pause for duration" within a "loop." The specific pause is 5 minutes.I used a "run if" so that it only happens every 40 items. I noticed in my workflow history that the workflow did not pause as expected. I added a log to check within the run if statement.  Any ideas why it's skipping the pause? I attached snapshots of my workflow as well as the workflow history from a specific instance. 


6 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +13

Can you show a screenshot of your pause action settings?

Badge +2

Sure see below. Nothing complicated about it. Pause Config

Userlevel 5
Badge +13

That's odd; I've had this happen once before and it was (inexplicably) resolved by deleting and re-adding the pause action. 

Badge +2

Yea I tried that already. No luck. 

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I gave up removed the pause.

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Hi John Troup‌!

I think I found a solution to that issue. I faced it as well. The reason why this keeps happening is related to the fact (possibly this is your case too), that you have too many actions in a batch, executing longer than the end time of the pause action. Have a look at this: Why are the pause actions not pausing? 

So if your workflow starts at 10am and you see all log to history records are having that time of occurrence and you want to have the 5 minutes pause action, workflow manager will count, that as it will also have the start time set to 10am, then it should end at 10:05am. Meanwhile, execution of actions before the pause is taking more time and the pause is in fact executed ex. at 10:03am.

There are two times, you have to be aware of:

1. Time when the action is logged, that is executed;

2. Current time.

Even though, in workflow history action is registered to be executed at ex. 10am, actually it gets executed at a current time. And if the "un-pause" time is greater than the "time when actions is logged + pause" workflow manager simply ignores it, thinking that the "un-pause" time has already passed so no pause is needed anymore.

I hope I made it clear

Regards,

Tomasz

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