Scheduled workflow restarting every five minutes

[#1]

HI All,

     I developed a site workflow and scheduled it to run every day, but unexpectedly workflow runs ever 5 minutes automatically. I don't know how this run every 5 minutes, I done schedule settings to run every day only. anybody knows please help me on this strange behavior.

Regards,

Nagendra.

[andrewg]

Does the workflow start, but fail to complete, each time it runs?

[#3]

yes Andrew, it fail to complete but after some time it will complete.

[4lexk]

I have exactly the same issue with Nintex WF 2013

[andrewg]

What are some of your specs? SP2013? On Prem I assume. Do you have a multi tiered farm?(WFE, APP, SQL)

Also I would review this document for reference to correct 3 tier setup of the workflow timer service. Workflows not continuing - Timer Service and Delays

[mmatsako]

Hi there,

Can you put a Pause action as the first step in your workflow?  Depending on the complexity and size of the workflow, it is possible that is timing out and then restarting every 5 minutes.   Once you make this modification, publish and then reschedule the workflow to see if it fixed the issue.  If this does not work, then I would look to restarting the timer service.

Thanks

Mike

[#7]

I've had this issue. I can't remember the exact fix, but it was one of the below.

• Stop the Workflow Timer job on all WFE and stop it from rerunning
• Stop the Workflow Scheduler Timer job on all WFE and stop it from rerunning
• Remove the workflow schedule from the site. If the workflow is running and causing an error then fix the error. If the workflow is throwing an error before starting then stopping the above services and removing the schedule should be enough to stop the workflow running every 5 mins.
• More than likely you have an issue with the NWF Content DB. Check the size of the Nintex WF Content DB. If its over 10GB you may have an issue with the workflow progress table and new workflow progress not being able to write to the DB properly. This article has the details you need. Purge Workflow Data - Reduce the size of the workflow progress database table
• Once you've fixed everything restart the workflow timer jobs that you stopped.

Good luck. I've been burnt by this a couple of times.

[#8]

This was also happening for me. I found that I had a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service started on a server without Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application started as per below.

WFE

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application - Started
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service - Started

APP

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application - Stopped
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service - Started

I read this article. First paragraph: Workflows and the SharePoint services required to run them

Resolution for me:

1. Delete the schedules (may not be necessary but I did)
2. Stop (or start) both services on the APP server. Don't have one started without the other.
3. Recreate the schedules
4. All worked as it should

[#9]

Hi Nagendra,

This most likely indicates that an error is occurring, causing the schedule to try again in 5 minutes. Without knowing what's in your SharePoint logs, it's difficult to determine the exact fix, as this issue could be caused by a number of different issues.

My advice would be to contact support @ Nintex.com, providing as much detail about the issue as possible. Be sure to include a screenshot of the Farm Topology from CA, the version of Nintex Workflow from the Licensing page in CA, plus the SharePoint logs which match the time the schedule should have run.

Once support has those details, they can determine the underlying cause and provide a possible solution.

Thanks