At some point, if you work with workflows, you'll probably run into a scenario in which you need to pause your workflow for a duration of time. Generally this works fine with days and weeks, but for very small amounts of time, say a minute, often it doesn't seem to work. The pause for 1 minute could equally be 10 minutes in reality.
This can affect a number of things, particularly, as we saw recently; testing. We needed to test dozens of record entries into a system which had a workflow with 1-3 pauses depending on some settings. It would have been very inefficient to potentially have to wait 30 minutes for a single record entry to partially complete; particularly when we needed a very large number of records.
Now, normally, if we have Visual Studio at our disposal, there's a number of ways we can replace those workflow pauses with. In this case, the product was a SharePoint Designer Workflow. This meant we were stuck with the built in pause functionality in this scenario and without much time to find a workaround.
The solution came from one of our developers here, Brian Russo, who dug up the following stsadm command:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv "Every 1 minutes between 0 and 59" –url "http://intranet.litwareinc.com"
If you copy and paste the above, remember that the - will have to be deleted and retyped; they don't transfer to the command window very well for some reason.
Essentially what we're doing is changing the OWS Timer job to check every 1 minute instead of every 5. Since even when a pause is complete the Timer has to "see" it's done when it's cycled, if it's every 5 minutes and our pause ended sometime x between those cycles, we potentially could be waiting up to just shy of 10 minutes. By setting it to 1 minute, we close that window to just under 2 minutes.
That said, this is not a best practice, nor something we'd recommend for a production server as a faster OWS Timer cycle will increase load on a system. But if you have no other options and you *need* to get things running, this might just save you a lot of headaches and wasted time.