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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Workflows delayed start
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Workflows delayed start

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Posted on by JayRogers

Hi All

We currently have CRM Dynamics 2011 and we have many workflows that run on the system.

Usually, workflows trigger as soon as they are supposed to, but recently, they are taking 5-20 minutes to kick in.

They aren't getting stuck whilst executing, they are simply not starting.

We have a simple workflow that sends an email when a case is created. If I look at the workflows executed on the case, the workflows would take 10 minutes just to appear.

This delay has started happening recently. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

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  • Suggested answer
    Hosk Profile Picture
    Hosk on at

    My first suggestion would be to restart your ASYNC services to see if this makes any difference, usually this will resolve the problem

    The async services are on the CRM server, in the control panel - services.

    service name

    MSCRMAsyncService

    Display name

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service

    Sometimes the Async service can get stuck or consume lots of memory and then become very slow.

  • JayRogers Profile Picture
    JayRogers on at

    Hi

    Thanks for the speedy response. When I try and restart this service, it takes a while and gives me a message saying 'Failed to stop service'.

  • Hosk Profile Picture
    Hosk on at

    What this means is it has become stuck

    windows has tried to close the workflow down but it has taken so long to respond it, windows thinks it's not working.

    I think it might eventually manage to stop itself but if you want to close it right now then you need to open Task Manager (I can click on the navigation bar at the bottom and click start task manager or you could do Ctrl + Alt + Delete)

    You can then find the CrmAsyncService, right click and end process.

    The negative of closing the processes is you will stop it half way through what ever it is doing (e.g. what ever workflows it is currently processing), so I would give the windows services an hour or so to see if it does a controlled stop

    You will then be able to start the CRM Service in Services and hopefully you workflow issues will be resolved

  • JayRogers Profile Picture
    JayRogers on at

    Hi

    I've managed to completely stop the Async service and restart it but this hasn't had any effect. Still a 10 minute delay.

  • Suggested answer
    Hosk Profile Picture
    Hosk on at

    what is the performance like on the server, what is the  memory and CPU usage like.

    is your general CRM performance ok.

    it's sounds like a cop out but I would think about restarting the server, just to see if this had any improvement.

    what is the connetion like between the CRM server and the SQL server?

    I know CRM in general can slow down if the AsyncOperationBase gets to big

    support.microsoft.com/.../968520

  • JayRogers Profile Picture
    JayRogers on at

    performance is generally good, 800 users are on the system and it is working ok for all.

    We restarted the server last Thursday which seemed to have no affect again.

    What classes as 'Too Big'. There are 700000+ records in the AsyncOperationBase table up until September 2013 so I would expect there to be well over 1,000,000 rows in the table (it was taking too long to execute the query).

  • Suggested answer
    Hosk Profile Picture
    Hosk on at

    800 users is quite a lot of users, do you have a few CRM servers, some for the async services and some for the front end?

    I'm not sure if there is a general size which is too big but usually if you are having performance issues you look at trying to reduce this table size.  If query the table is taking to long then I guess you should reduce it because this is what CRM does to check the security privileges and could be a reason for the slow down.

    I would try reducing the async table

    support.microsoft.com/.../968520

    mabye this

    gonzaloruizcrm.blogspot.co.uk/.../improving-async-performance-in-one.html

    and if they don't improve it I would raise a ticket with MS support

  • Suggested answer
    ScottDurow Profile Picture
    ScottDurow 23 on at

    Ben makes all good points.Delays in workflows starting can also be caused by there being many other workflows/async plugins/system jobs in the queue. The Async service will only attempt to run a finite number of tasks at any one time. The fact that you couldn't shut down your Async Service leads me to think that it is running long running tasks.

    I've seen big data imports block workflows from running because of this issue - especially if each of the records being imported kicks off other workflows. This will create a big backlog of SystemJobs - so any new ones will take time to get picked up.

    Do an advanced find on your SystemJob entity (asyncoperation) and look for workflows that are 'waiting for resource' or 'in progress'.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • JayRogers Profile Picture
    JayRogers on at

    Just did the advanced find view of All System Jobs where status reason = Waiting for Resources/In Progress...

    There are none.

    Although, there are over 4000 system jobs with the status of Waiting created this month alone... Could this be an issue?

  • Suggested answer
    ScottDurow Profile Picture
    ScottDurow 23 on at

    Whilst there are no jobs running or pending - do you still have the delay in workflows starting?

    Are those 4000 system jobs all workflows that you would expect to have run? What are they waiting on?

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