How to Improve Workflow Performance in SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint workflows are getting  slow for several reasons. in my environment I'm having a problem with following performance issues, therefore in my environment i got following problems.

• When a item added to the library it takes some times to initiate the workflow.
• Workflow mail generating is not very fast sometimes.
• Workflows takes more time to process
• “Due to heavy load, the latest workflow operation has been queued. It will attempt to resume at a later time” is coming sometimes.
• I had a custom workflow approval web part and it is taking more than 30 seconds to proceed.

Work Done

I had a custom workflow approval web part and it is taking more than 30 seconds to proceed.

here in my custom web part there is the function which is programmatically updating the workflow.

SPWorkflowTask.AlterTask(item, data, false)

the last parameter mentioning whether it is synchronous asynchronous. if  is it true it it will wait until workflow schedule accept the workflow task. this is taking 30 seconds most of  the time. if it is false the method will return true immediately and not waiting for schedule approval.

Reference:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.workflow.spworkflowtask.altertask.aspx   

Farm Level Workflow Improvements

There are few ways that we can improve SharePoint workflow  services.

• Increase Throttle Size
• Increase Batch Size
• Time Out
• Workflow Timer Interval

Increase Throttle Size

“The workflow throttle setting controls how many workflows can be processing at any one time on the entire server farm”. (Ref MSDN) since if we  can increase the throttle it will help to increase the number of workflows running at a time.

Following command shows how to get the existing value. the default is set to 15. use SharePoint shell to execute this command.

stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle

You can change the value by using following command. Below example change the current value to 25.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle -pv "25"

Increase Batch Size

“batch size property controls how many work items waiting to be processed by the timer service will be executed in each run” (Ref MSDN). Therefore if we increase the Batch Size there will be more workflow items ready to execute in the next time. Batch size is improving performance in Immediate Execution and Timer Job.

Following command shows the current batch size in the farm.

stsadm -o getproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize

as you can see default value is set to 100. following command will increate the size to 125.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize -pv "125"

Time Out

Timeout specify the time which can be take maximum to complete the workflow timer job. of cause not finished timers jobs can  proceed in next cycle. this value is specify in minutes. default value is 5.

Following command shows how you can view the current configuration.

stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout

Following command will change the existing value to 10.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout -pv "10"

Workflow Timer Interval

Workflow timer Interval how often SPtimer job should run to process workflow items. this is specify in the application level not in the farm level like others.

following command shows the current setting of the web application.

stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-workflow -url http://Webapplication

If you type wrong URL following error will come.

The server administration programs and the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web applications on this Web server are not compatible.  Ensure that the administration program is the same version as the Web application.

Following table shows the values you can set for the property.

SPTimer schedule string format	Meaning
"Every 10 minutes between 0 and 30"	Timer fires every 10 minutes from the top of the hour to half past the hour
"Hourly between 9 and 17"	Every hour from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.
"Daily at 15:00:00"	Timer fires every day at 3 P.M.
"Monthly at 15 15:00:00"	Timer fires on the 15th of every month at 3 P.M.

Following command set the workflow timer interval.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv "Every 10 minutes between 0 and 30" -url http://webapplication:port