Execution Queue Stuck

Questions
1

I’m experiencing an issue with my execution queue being stuck.

What happened: I had 5 workflows scheduled at 30-minute intervals. After they started running, I changed each to 1 hour 10 minute intervals, which caused scheduling overlaps. This triggered the concurrency limit (5 concurrent executions), and all workflows went to “Queued” status.

I then cancelled all executions and deleted those 5 workflows. However, my other scheduled workflows are now permanently stuck in “Queued” status, even though Current Active Executions shows 0 out of 5.

What I’ve tried:

  • Cancelled all pending executions

  • Deleted the problematic workflows

  • Restarted the workspace

  • Manual execution works fine

  • Only scheduled triggers show “Queued”

Request: Could you please manually reset/clear the execution queue on my instance? It seems the queue state didn’t properly clear after I cancelled and deleted those workflows.

Thanks, Naman

2

Hey Naman,

I’ve seen this exact thing a couple of times – when you cancel executions during a concurrency overload, the internal queue counter sometimes gets “stuck” and doesn’t reset to zero, even though the dashboard shows 0/5 active.

Manual runs work because they bypass the scheduler queue completely.

Unfortunately we can’t manually clear the queue from the community forum (only the n8n team can do that on hosted/cloud instances), but since you’re self-hosting, here’s what almost always fixes it:

  1. Stop your Docker container (or PM2/service).

  2. Prune old executions from the database:

    Bash

    docker exec -it <your-n8n-container> n8n execution:prune

    (or if you have direct DB access, truncate the execution table carefully).

  3. Restart the container.

This forces a clean state and the scheduler queue usually resets itself.

If that doesn’t do it, try adding --concurrency=1 temporarily when starting n8n, let one scheduled workflow run through, then remove the flag and restart again.

Let me know how it goes – it’s annoying when it gets stuck like this! Good luck