Workflow(2010) need to be triggered twice after being published or after SharePoint server (2013) is rebooted

There are more than 200 site collections in Production environment. Many of them have SharePoint Designer workflows (declarative workflows). No customized activity get involved.

Recently users reported that a few workflows could not get triggered. But this problem only happened intermittently, and only 2010 workflow have this issue..

I did some test. They were right: I have to trigger the workflow twice to make it work, if the workflow got re-published, of if the SharePoint Server 2013 is rebooted.

There was not specific error message in ULS or Windows Events log, and the problem only appears in two site collections.

That's hard for trouble shooting.

My first guess: some site collection level feature is corrupted. The feature should be related to Workflow 2010. The most famous one is "Microsoft Office Server workflows" ("OffWFCommon", c9c9515d-e4e2-4001-9050-74f980f93160).

The PowerShell script below shows that the feature is activated properly.

$site = get-spsite $url
Get-SPFeature -Site $site -Limit All |?{$_.DisplayName -match "OffWFCommon"} | select *

What the problem could be? After hours of struggling, finally I found how to fix it: disable this site collection feature, and then rebuild the workflow.

(Thanks for the "copy and paste" functionality in SharePoint Designer, to rebuild a workflow is not as hard as before.)

Once the feature is disabled, we cannot modify the workflow initialization form any more. But, in most of cases, that’s not a problem.

Why this can fix the problem? I have no idea.

Please share your insight in comments if you know the root cause.  Many thanks!

PS: In SharePoint 2010, if this feature is disabled, then workflow will not be triggered. I haven't test it in SharePoint 2016 yet.