Executions stuck in Queued/Waiting state – No active executions despite available concurrency

Questions
1

Describe the problem/error/question

Multiple workflows are stuck in Queued / Starting soon state and do not start executing.

In the Executions overview, there are no active executions shown, but new executions immediately go into the queue and never move to Running.

Some workflows show multiple executions in Waiting state (from several days ago), and after that moment all new executions started queueing without being processed.

The issue affects multiple workflows, not only the ones mentioned in the “Sub-workflow waiting node output behavior change” notice.

Concurrency is set to 20 and we are not near any execution limits.

What is the error message (if any)?

There is no explicit error message.

Executions show:

Status: Queued / Starting soon

Status: Waiting

UI shows: No active executions

But nothing transitions to Running.

Please share your workflow/screenshots/recording

Key observations from screenshots:

Multiple executions stuck in Waiting since Feb 13.

New executions go directly into Queued.

No executions shown as Running.

Concurrency is set to 20.

Enterprise (sandbox) license.

There is a sub-workflow call involved in at least one of these workflows.

(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ If you have sensitive data in your workflow (like API keys), please remove it before sharing.

Share the output returned by the last node

There is no output because executions never reach the last node.
They either:

stay in Waiting state

or remain Queued and never start

Expected behavior:
Executions should move from Queued → Running → Success.

Actual behavior:
Executions remain in Queued indefinitely.

Debug info

core

  • n8nVersion: 2.0.3

  • platform: docker (cloud)

  • nodeJsVersion: 22.21.0

  • nodeEnv: production

  • database: sqlite

  • executionMode: regular

  • concurrency: 20

  • license: enterprise (sandbox)

storage

  • success: all

  • error: all

  • progress: false

  • manual: true

  • binaryMode: filesystem

pruning

  • enabled: true

  • maxAge: 720 hours

  • maxCount: 25000 executions

client

  • userAgent: mozilla/5.0 (macintosh; intel mac os x 10_15_7) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/144.0.0.0 safari/537.36

  • isTouchDevice: false

2

@Kamiel_Donkersloot Hello! have you tried restarting your instance?

3

Yes I restarted it and nothing changed sadly

4

@Kamiel_Donkersloot I would try contacting [email protected]. Since your enterprise, and restarting didn’t work, your enterprise plan allows you to get support from them quicker. That’s really the only thing I can think of at the moment.

5

What is likely happening if the executions remain stuck in the “Queued/Starting soon” phase and and nothing seems to be running. It is likely that the main processes isn’t picking up jobs, despite the concurrency being set correctly.

You should check:

  • Whether the container was restarted after Feb 13 when executions got stuck.
  • If there is are any locked executions in the database
  • Container logs for worker crashes or unhandled errors
  • Disk space (since you’re using binaryMode: filesystem)

It is most likely that the execution engine got into a stuck state seeing that multiple executions have been in “Waiting” for days.

Since you mentioned that this issue returned after a restart, you might want to switch over to Postgres for the production. sqlite + Docker can cause exactly this kind of behavior under load.