It is a great thing to be able to just give our ideas to AI image generators and have them produce an image for us. Midjourney has been increasing in popularity for how easy it is to use and the great images it is able to produce. But it is frustrating if you've been having issues, so if you're looking at how to fix the Midjourney "Waiting to start" error we are here to help.
Users have been reporting a couple of issues using Midjourney, such as "failed to process command" and failed to request, but overall it seems to be working fine for most people, provided you use the right prompts for realism.
But still, if you've been finding yourself unable to produce your images because of the Midjourney "Waiting to start" error, there might be a few fixes worth trying out.
How to fix Midjourney "Waiting to start" error
Overall, getting a "Waiting to start" message is normal, as Midjourney queues different jobs depending if you've been using it in Relax or Fast mode. But you might have observed some of your jobs being stuck in that status for hours, so perhaps something went wrong in the queue process.
To fix Midjourney "Waiting to start" error, we would recommend you cancel the old one and insert a new one. That should probably solve the problem. Here's how you can cancel a previous Midjourney prompt:
- Find the job that's been stuck for a long time.
- React to that one job by selecting the "red X" emoji, by clicking the "Add reaction" button.
- Enter the same command one more time.
Hopefully, in a few minutes, the new job will start being processed by Midjourney so you can have your image ready.
How long it takes for Midjourney to start?
The way the AI works is by receiving inputs on its Discord channels, depending on the queue it might start processing some jobs first and others later. While it usually gets to all jobs that are queued, it might happen - for technical reasons or just temporary problems - that some get stuck.
Obviously, the waiting times for your jobs can be longer if you have been using Midjourney during peak times, when a lot of users are on the Discord server. These can range from a few minutes to even a couple of hours. We would definitely recommend, first, checking the average wait times before inputting jobs. But how to do it?
You can check the average wait times by looking at the official server status page. The page is useful to have a glance at the overall real-time status of Midjourney's Discord server, Discord Bot, and website. But it also provides average wait times.
These can be quite useful to decide if to use Fast or Relax mode, but also which of the different Midjourney algorithms to use. The page shows the status of the following algorithms:
- V4 Model
- V4 Upscaler
- V5 Model
- Niji V4
- Niji V4 Upscaler
- Njii V5
Looking at the average wait times is quite useful information to decide which of the different algorithms to use, along with the mode (provided you have access to Fast). But, if all else fails, it might just be a matter of waiting.