Hi All 

 

I have found some material for you on the SharePoint limitations when hosting Workflow schedules.

 

Here is a comment I just received directly from George Hatoun, Lead program manager who drove the workflow implementation for MOSS

For example:

Let’s say I have one server scenario (to make it simple) and I have 15 running instances of document approval workflow across 3 libraries (5 per library).  Lets also say that the current status of each is “awaiting” approval. Does this imply the workflows are “not finished executing” and if I kick off a 16th workflow instance, nothing will happen, until one of the others has completed?

 When I wrote “finished executing”, I meant that it is no longer actively being processed by workflow engine on the front-end machine and consuming CPU. Well-written workflows awaiting approval or other user input would go “idle” and are immediately “dehydrated” (serialized) to disk by the SharePoint workflow host; we wake them up when an event they are subscribed to comes in.

 

They do not count towards the limit of 15 actively executing workflows. There is no hard limit on these, and the SharePoint workflow host is designed so that these workflows have little impact on the performance of the system apart from the storage they consume in the backend.

Here are some Blogs for you to look at around this issue:

 

http://geek.hubkey.com/2007/09/maximum-number-of-simultaneous.html

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/harsh/archive/2007/03/21/sharepoint-2007-maximum-limitations.aspx

 

Here is some other interesting reading:

 

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/llowevad/archive/2007/09/21/huge-workflow-issue-what-is-microsoft-thinking.aspx

 

http://k2underground.com/blogs/articles/archive/2007/07/11/to-moss-or-not-to-moss.aspx