When job creation takes to long, ecflow server writes a message to the log file. It can be slow for a variety of reasons.

• The disk where the server is running is slow.
• The number of includes in the .ecf may be excessive, causing very large job files.
• Preprocessing takes to long. (i.e. replacing %VAR% in the .ecf file, with variables in the Node tree), removing comments and manual sections, etc.
• The server may be running out memory.
• The server is starved of CPU time, competing with other processes.

When the ecflow server is started, the ECF_TASK_THRESHOLD is read from the environment.

Job creation taking longer than this threshold is written as a warning in the log file. The default threshold is 4000 milliseconds seconds.

However, in most cases this was ignored by the user until some other problem arises.

In ecflow 5 series, they will be notified in the GUI  that the task has exceeded this threshold, by a new icon. This will allow early diagnoses of a looming problem.