Steven Van de Craen's Blog

Recently I helped out a colleague with an issue in a load balanced SharePoint 2013 environment with Nintex Workflow 2013 on it. All the workflows that were started on WFE1 worked fine, but all started on WFE2 failed on start with the following issue logged to the SharePoint ULS logs:

Load Workflow Class: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.InvalidOperationException: The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter.InitializeImpl()

at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter..ctor(String categoryName, String counterName, String instanceName, Boolean readOnly)

at System.Workflow.Runtime.PerformanceCounterManager.CreateCounters(String name)

at System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting.ManualWorkflowSchedulerService.OnStarted()

at System.EventHandler`1.Invoke(Object sender, TEventArgs e)

at System.Workflow.Runtime.WorkflowRuntime.StartRuntime()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWinOeHostServices..ctor(SPSite site, SPWeb web, SPWorkflowManager manager, SPWorkflowEngine engine) -

-- End of inner exception stack trace ---

at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor)

at System.Reflection.RuntimeConstructorInfo.Invoke(BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)

at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)

at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)

at System.Reflection.Assembly.CreateInstance(String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowManager.LoadPluggableClass(String classname, String assembly, Object[] parameters)

If you look up this issue you’ll find a lot of references to SharePoint 2007, but it seems that this is still possible in a SharePoint 2013 / Windows Server 2012 environment as well.

Cause

An incorrect registration of the Windows Workflow Foundation performance counters will cause this. You can easily verify this by opening up perfmon, adding a counter and looking for the category “Windows Workflow Foundation”.

Solution

Register the performance counters on each affected server:

lodctr C:\Windows\Inf\Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0.0.0\perfcounters.ini

That restores the counters and will make your workflows start again!