Queues and cron

Live workflows rely on two Magento queue consumers and one cron job.

Component Purpose
workflow.event.trigger.consumer Processes registered event messages and matches them to published definitions.
workflow.run.start.consumer Starts or resumes workflow runs and advances their nodes.
workflow_resume_due_runs Runs each minute and queues waiting runs whose resume time has arrived.

Run the consumers through the same supervised process used for the store's other Magento consumers. For a manual diagnostic, Magento can start an individual consumer with queue:consumers:start, but a long-running production setup needs process supervision and restart handling.

php bin/magento queue:consumers:start workflow.event.trigger.consumer
php bin/magento queue:consumers:start workflow.run.start.consumer

Health check

  1. Confirm that Magento cron runs successfully.
  2. Confirm that both consumers are configured and remain alive.
  3. Publish a small controlled workflow.
  4. Trigger its Magento event.
  5. Verify that the definition grid receives a latest-run status.
  6. For a Human Task, decide it and verify that the run continues.
  7. For a short Wait in staging, verify that cron queues it after the due time and the run consumer completes it.

Queue backlog explains several misleading symptoms: a real order exists but no task appears; a decision is saved but the run stays waiting; or a wait passes without continuation. Check the correct stage before changing the definition.

The runtime retry and batch limits are global settings. Increasing them is not a substitute for fixing a repeatedly failing node or undersized worker pool.