In the event you are running a lot of jobs on your SQL Server, or you happen to have a great number of jobs that kick off close to each other and use the same subsystem (i.e. PowerShell) then you might receive a warning in the SQL Agent Error Log stating that the job step “is being queued for the PowerShell subsystem”.

This queuing is deliberate. Microsoft put in safeguards around the various subsystems that the Agent calls in order to help prevent any particular subsystem from taking over all the worker threads (after all you wouldn’t want your 25 PowerShell job steps preventing your queries from running because they’d taken all the worker threads would you?)

This is one of the reasons that I like to use dedicated servers just to handle all jobs/ETL processes. I like to keep my local jobs to just maintenance processes (backup/reindex/checkdb) wherever possible. In doing this I need to be sure that I am able to increase the max worker threads associated to a subsystem to be sure that jobs don’t get delayed. As such I keep an eye on the SQL Agent Error Log and server resources to check that I don’t get thread starvation issues (and being just a job server that’s pretty unusual).

Today I saw a bunch of warnings in the log to do with PowerShell job steps being queued. This wasn’t a surprise as I had added a whole bunch of new jobs and had not adjusted things from the default values. First I went through and grabbed the default information for each of the subsystems so that I could easily revert if the need arose:

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