Policy Based Workflow is triggered a second time under heavy load

Products

• CA Identity Manager

Issue/Introduction

The customer is facing an issue where Policy based Workflow is triggered a second time under heavy load.

Workflow jobs are initiated twice during high load like Bulk Loads.

As a result, the event stays in progress.

Environment

Release : 14.4

Component : IdentityMinder(Identity Manager)

Cause

This problem has been observed in the following situation:
1. High activity
2. Policy Based Workflow
3. Custom workflow where approval is done immediately without delay.

Resolution

Adding a delay between the nodes after the Approved transition resolved the issue.

Additional Information

When a policy-based workflow is used, there is more event related information requested in that transaction than when policy-based workflow is not used. This is why we will see the in-progress events/tasks due to race conditions – the Workflow context retrieves data that is “stale” i.e. the data is before the IM context has had a chance to commit.
If the complexity of the workflow process definition is increased, it starts to retrieve more IM event context in custom scripts then we will see the race conditions even without policy-based workflow under load.