Performance : Too many active executing workflows

[Constantine Kr1]

Question : Does the number of "executing" workflow contexts impact ServiceNow's performance?

Background : I am working on an instance that has over 40,000 (forty thousand) active "executing" workflows. These were discovered by going to the Workflow Operations Dashboard. Upon further inspection, a number of these workflows are not connected to an "End" activity. Ultimately, I am trying to figure out the impact this large number of workflows is having on the instance performance as a whole.

Thanks in advance,

~Constantine

[Gurpreet07 · Accepted solution]

Yes,This is something to do with system Ram wherever your ServiceNow web application is hosted. Below the comment from Snow regarding our instance performance talk.

Review workflows and make sure every process has an "end" that it will default to if running too long.

This can contribute to high memory utilization issues.

[andrew_venables]

Yes it could potentially have a big impact on performance. Depending on your specific workflow configuration the platform could be performing operations on those workflows everytime some records in the platform are touched.

This is known as a key indicator of instance health and something that is validated in ServiceNow configuration reviews.