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Impact of decreasing value of workflow timer job RRS feed

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    I am following this technet article (link) about setting how frequent would the timerjob that recovers workflow from a delay activity be run. The web application that I am dealing with obviously have a lot of workflows.

    What is the impact (eg, performance, existing workflow, concurrency) of decreasing this timer interval from the default (every 5 minutes between 0 to 59) to say every 1 minute between 0 and 59?

    We have turned this down in DEV but the are extra cautious about making this change in other environments, especially in PROD unless we fully understand the impact.

    Thursday, October 11, 2012 6:15 AM

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    Hi ,

    I understand that you use the link provided above to change the workflow timer interval.

    The workflow timer interval specifies how often the workflow SPTimer job fires to process pending workflow tasks. This interval also represents the granularity of delay timers within your workflow. If a timer is set to delay for one minute, but the interval timer fires only every five minutes, the workflow delays for five minutes, not one minute.

    For performance considerations, if your workflow creates a lot of work items, you can use this setting, in conjunction with the batch size, to control the processing of those settings. For example, with a batch size of 100 (the default) and a timer interval of five minutes (the default), Windows SharePoint Services processes at most 100 work items every five minutes. If the batch of 100 work items for one workflow instance finishes processing in two seconds, your workflow instance is sitting idle for 4 minutes and 58 seconds. This may be acceptable; it may not. Decreasing this interval setting allows more batches to process by causing the timer to fire more often and request more work to do; but it also means that workflow processing consumes more server resources.

    Thanks,

    Entan Ming

    TechNet Subscriber Support in forum

    If you have any feedback on our support, please contacttnmff@microsoft.com.

    Entan Ming

    TechNet Community Support

    Friday, October 12, 2012 6:15 AM
    Moderator