Background Task Delay

Note: This view is only available to server administrators. To access server views on multi-site deployments, click the site menu and select Manage All Sites. For information about how to navigate to administrative views, see Administrative Views .

The Background Task Delay view displays the delay for flow tasks, extract refresh tasks and for subscription tasks – that is, the amount of time between when they are scheduled to run and when they actually run. You can use the view to help you identify places you can improve server performance by distributing your task schedules and by optimising tasks.

Here are possible reasons for the delays, and ways that you might reduce the delays:

  • Many tasks are scheduled for the same time. In the example view, tasks that show long delays are clustered at the same time every day, which creates spikes in the wait time. Note that you can set the Timeline filter to a single day to view task delays by hour and identify the hours of the day which have many tasks scheduled at the same time. A solution to this issue can be to distribute the tasks to off-peak hours to reduce load on the server.

  • Specific tasks take a long time to run and are preventing other tasks from running. For example, there might be an extract refresh job that is connecting to a slow data source or that is processing a large amount of data. Use the Background Tasks for Extracts administrative view to identify which extract refresh tasks are running slowly. You can then optimise the extract refresh task by filtering the data, aggregating the data, or creating multiple data sources for individual tables in a data source.

  • Other server processes are running at the same time and are consuming server resources and slowing down performance. Monitor the CPU and memory usage of server processes to see which processes are consuming the most resources and then adjust the configuration of processes on your server. For more information on monitoring processes, see Collect Data with Windows Performance Monitor. For more information on tuning the performance of server processes, see Performance Tuning.

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