topic Schedule in an infinite loop - SOLUTION in Product Forum

Schedule in an infinite loop - SOLUTION

PriyankaTailor — Thu, 24 May 2018 10:48:00 GMT

In case anyone else goes through this... Issue: You set up a schedule and now it won't stop running. You try to update the tasks to stop on complete or abort on exception and it doesn't do what it's told. You've expired and retired the schedule, or even deleted it, yet the tasks/processes continue to run in control room. When you disconnect the resource(s), the processes stop running, but they restart as soon as the resource is reconnected. Stopping the process will stop that one, but then the next task starts straight away. It's an infinite loop within scheduler! I didn't know that that could happen... Cause (for me): The schedule was set up where no process had "Stop" or "Abort" as it's On Complete or On Exception action. This was because the business asked for process to run 24/7 and to go back up to the top when finished. So each task in the schedule led to another task in the schedule. Solution (for me - and we tested this in QA first): 1. Immediate solution: retire all the processes in the problematic schedule - this stops the infinite loop (for now) 2. Stop all the other schedules running on all resources in that environment. 3. Disconnect all resources (so they all show as offline) 4. Close Blue Prism (and get everyone on the environment to save their work and do the same) 5. Restart the App Server Blue Prism Service 6. Open Blue Prism back up and un-retire the processes 7. Re-connect your resources The infinite loop should have stopped. You can restart your other schedules. Do not restart the problematic schedule. You need to schedule this differently. For me the optimal schedule was to have the original schedule running from start to finish and with the last one having Stop and Abort as the On Complete or On Exception actions. Then scheduling the schedule to run frequently. Please note this wasn't a Blue Prism recommended solution but it worked for us. Hope this helps others - feel free to comment after if there are better alternatives.

That's a long winded…

MikeHiggs — Thu, 31 May 2018 17:34:00 GMT

That's a long winded-workaround.. glad it worked for you. However, even if the process should be scheduled to run 24/7 you need to build in control to such as abort and the ability to stop immediately from the control room. This is best practice.

This seems like a really big…

MichelCavas — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 16:22:00 GMT

This seems like a really big issue, when retiring and even deleting the schedule doesn't stop it from running in an infinite loop.

We do have those controls in…

PriyankaTailor — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:15:00 GMT

We do have those controls in place so we could stop each process using the session variables... then the next one would just start...

RE: Schedule in an infinite loop - SOLUTION

Ernest1 — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 11:12:00 GMT

An infinite loop occurs when, for example, the user makes some changes to a running schedule - it should be blocked in Blue Prism
if such a loop occurs you just need to remove the wrong schedules and stop/restart the Blue Prism service on the server.

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Marcin Grzelak
RPA Developer
Open Life TU Życie S.A.
Europe/Warsaw
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Re: Schedule in an infinite loop - SOLUTION

Himanshujain42 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 06:43:00 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I am not certain about earlier versions; however, in Blue Prism version 7.4.0, a Stop option is available for schedulers. You can access this by right-clicking on the scheduler and selecting Stop. This action will immediately stop any bot runs associated with that scheduler and stop the scheduler itself.

Himanshu Jain
RPA Developer (India)