Workflows stuck 'in progress' when moved to sharepoint farm environment

Question

We have developed a number of custom approval workflows in visual studio 2008. They basically create task and work through a 2 stage approval process, once a task is completed, it generates new tasks for stage 2, then completes.

These have been tested and work well in a single server moss/sharepoint environment.

We have now moved them to a test farm environment with 2 Web Front Ends, 1 SSP/Search Server, 1 SQL Server.

The workflows now get stuck in progress, after completing the first stage of the workflow, as if the workflow is not recognising that something has changed.

No errors, in our logging code, none in the SP logs.

Would appreciate anyones thoughts on this.

Answer 1

Try attaching a debugger to the SPTimer service -this is responsible for running workflow code asynchronously - this might give you some hints. Also ensure that the account running sptimer has not gotten out of sync with the farm account, in terms of credentials (password expired etc). Don't forget to bounce this service too when updating your workflow builds - bouncing IIS is not enough. The timer service may have the workflow assembly loaded.

-Oisin

Answer 2

We ended up using Windbg and referencing this article http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/07/25/debugging-tips-for-sharepoint-and-wss-exceptions.aspx. We did this on the server with the problem and found that it was not able to fire or 'wake up' the workflow as it would not fire the task changed event. This we found was an accepted bug and was addressed in cumulative updates and services packs for moss.