BizTalk Delay shape not delaying

I had an odd issue earlier where the Delay shape in a BizTalk Orchestration was not delaying. The timeout happened seemingly immediately (100ms) - when I checked the code it was hard-coded to a two minute timespan.

The code is well established so nobody had been changing it recently. I figured it was a funny five minutes and restarted the host instances but that didn't help.

As it was time related I had a hunch to check the time, and I noticed that one of my hosts' time was drifting. It turned out a DC had had its time configuration messed up. The issue remained once the app hosts had synced up which lead me to check the SQL database host, which was also suffering from drift.

I resynced the SQL host (w32tm /resync) and the problem cleared itself up.

Keeping time synced across your systems is very important, the code here started to fail but before long Kerberos would have started to fail preventing logon events.

In a Windows domain, all clients will sync with the DC (or, one of) unless you explicitly override it. Be sure that your DC is syncing with a time-server.