Avoid throttling

Throttling is one of the biggest issues caused by poor design of workflows. Throttling is done by SharePoint Online to manage fair use of resources and in the context of Nintex for Office 365, throttling can impact the app or single workflow instances. Some of the main causes of workflow throttling are given below:

• If a high number of requests are made by workflows to a SharePoint site, then the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 app may be blocked. For more information, see Avoid getting throttled or blocked in SharePoint Online.
• If a single workflow instance makes many requests out of the Workflow system, the instance may be suspended. For more information, see SharePoint 2013 workflow throttling and performance in SharePoint Online and Project Online.

Best practices to follow to avoid throttling

• Identify and remove workflows that are designed to do any of the following:
  • Retrieve information from hundreds of SharePoint items.
  • Update hundreds of SharePoint items.

• Split large workflows into smaller sub workflows with fewer actions. This reduces the number of requests from a workflow instance. For more information about splitting workflows, see Splitting large workflows.