SPD Workflow stuck on "In progress" after hitting Pause

Question

I have a customer who is using SP Designer to build a workflow with some Custom Actions.

One of the actions is create a new site based in some properties form current item. The file will be attached to that site but they have to wait a little bit for the site to be created. So they are using a Pause action set for 1 min (this will make it 6 on the timer) . The issue is that after they hit the Pause the workflow never completed or getting any error.

The status of the workflow remains on “in Progress”.

 

They know that it never wakes up because they set a lot of Logs on the history so they can track the process. And even after 4 hours the pause is still on…

 

- They already tried restarting Timer service. No good

- Reboot all servers. No good

- Saved list as template and recreate the list. No good since SPD is attached to the list itself and it will be like recreating the whole workflow.

- They are patched to the Oct cumulative updates.

    

This was working before and stopped suddenly. Even though the workflow works until it get a pause.

Answer 1

have you verified the ULS entries, that may help you to find the cause for the failure..

c:/program files/common files/microsoft shared/web server extensions/12/logs

Answer 2

Hello,

 

After test in my environment, I can reproduce the issue same as yours, and after research I’ve found that is a known issue. The cause of it is that the pause duration you set is less than 5 minutes which is the default running interval of timer job.  The following KB article has the detailed explanation of this issue:

 

A timer does not resume operation after a workflow is reloaded in Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;932394

 

This fix is in the 3.0 Framework SP1 update.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=EC2CA85D-B255-4425-9E65-1E88A0BDB72A&displaylang=en

 
Note that the change only affects new workflows...applying the fix will not force the workflow that is paused to continue. You have to terminate the paused workflow and then manually start it back up for it to work correctly.

 

Regards,

Jerry

---

Xing-Bing Yu

Answer 3

I am having the same issue on MOSS 2007 Enterprise. After hitting the Pause, the workflow stays at In Progress. I am running .Net 3.5 SP1 on the server and MOSS is running at 12.0.0.6510.

Are there any know issues or fixes?

• Windows Server 2008 Standard - x64
• MOSS 2007 Enterprise - x64

As mentioned in the original post here it was working fine and now has decided to not work. Actually seems like it works part of the time, but I haven't verified that yet.

Answer 4

I have the same issue, some of my paused workflow don't wake up at the expected timeout. I'm increment the Due Date with the amount of time I want to wait for then do a "Pause for duration".  Every now and then I'll check my tasks list and some don't fire.

I'm on MOSS 2007 Enterprise SP3.  It was running fine until we added an index server to our farm. Of course, all servers in the farm have been rebooted multiple times until the crawls were configured correctly, so I'm wondering if that could have set the Timer out of whack.

Answer 5

I'm having the same issue, but on a single server installation. Have you resolved this yet?