From the description, the serverside components work but the stage view frontend is broken. A couple questions:

• What web browser are you using?
• Are there any errors in the jenkins log upon startup?
• Are there any browser errors or pages that fail to load when you visit the page for your job?
• Is the pipeline rest-api plugin installed and working?

• Chrome, Internet explorer, will try firefox today for the heck of it.
• Will try to check tonight, it's a messy jenkins so we have plenty of errors from way before I installed the pipeline plugins. Any particular errors I ought to be looking for?
• No browser errors I can think of. FYI, stage view frontend is missing when viewing from other comps, as well.
• Pipeline rest-api is installed, seems fine in the 'installed' tab under plugins. How do I go about checking that it's working?

Thanks a million for your time

java_err.txt
Ok, there was an error when inspecting the blank Full stage view in Chrome:
http://build01:8080/job/stability_post_nightly1/wfapi/runs?fullStages=true&_=1480420606537 Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Server Error)

please see the attached for a full error log.

nashpaz That appears to be an error in the workflow-support plugin preventing loading the workflow data for the start node:

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not load matching start node: java.io.IOException: java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.io.IOException: failed to load flow node from D:\Jenkins\jobs\stability_post_nightly1\builds\212\workflow\4.xml: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

What workflow-support version are you using? Does the issue persist if you update to the latest workflow-support plugin (and workflow-api plugin too, for good measure)?

For good measure: if you are on the latest workflow-support plugin, does the issue persist if you downgrade?

I'm on workflow-support 2.10 (latest is 2.11 but haven't had the chance to clear it with infosec and install it yet).
Any particular version to downgrade to?
In the meantime I noticed that new pipelines run fine. A stupid workaround for my problem is to copy the entire script from the job that displays an empty stage view to a new job, in which case I get the view (before running I see: Stage View - "No stages b/c no pipelines have run yet"). Multiple old jobs (jobs that have run a few times) don't display the stage view.
This is a bit of a relief because I have a presentation coming up, where things ought to look nice. Still banging my head over this though.

nashpaz23 Okay, so it's relieving to hear that the issue is on 2.10 and not 2.11. I'm going to reverse my advice here after having a spark of insight – I think a plugin change isn't going to fix this one. This is linked to a deserialization issue we've seen in rare cases. The pattern fits perfectly.

There's one (or a few) runs that are a problem. You can find them with this Groovy script script in the script console – warning: it will touch all the build data for every pipeline execution run, so do it during a quiet period and be patient for it to run.

import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.job.WorkflowJob;
import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.job.WorkflowRun;
import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.graph.FlowGraphWalker;
import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.graph.FlowNode;
import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.flow.FlowExecution;
import org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.graph.FlowStartNode;

List<FlowNode> failures = new ArrayList<FlowNode>();
for (WorkflowJob job : Jenkins.instance.getAllItems(WorkflowJob.class)) {
    for (WorkflowRun run : job.builds) {
        FlowExecution fe = run.execution;
        if (fe == null || fe.currentHeads.size() == 0) { continue;}
        FlowNode lastNode = fe.currentHeads.get(0);
        if (lastNode.getParents().size() == 0) {
            out.println("Parentless end flownode!!! [Job, Build, NodeId]: ["+job.fullName+", "+run.id+", "+fe.currentHeads.get(0).id+"]");
            failures.add(f);
            continue;
        }
        for (FlowNode f : new FlowGraphWalker(run.execution)) {
            if (f.getActions().size() == 0 && !(f instanceof FlowStartNode)) {
                out.println("Actionless FlowNode!!! [Job, Build, NodeID, class, isLast]: ["
                    +job.fullName+", "
                    +run.id+", "
                    +f.id+", "
                    +f.class.name.replace('org.jenkinsci.plugins.','o.j.p.')
                    +", "+(f.equals(lastNode))
                +"]")
                failures.add(f);
            }
        }
    }
}

If you remove the offending run(s) pipeline will just work. I believe this will be one more datapoint for fixing the issue in question, as well.

By 'runs' do you mean jobs? Or builds of the jobs?
I'm in an off-the-internet environment so it'll be a bit of a mess to bring this in. I could just remove all the jobs, and delete all the builds (I'm the only one currently using pipelines). Should that fix the issue?

I see exactly the same behavior.
Jenkins: 2.44
stage view plugin: 2.4
Windows 7

Perhaps interesting information: I changed

-Dcom.cloudbees.workflow.rest.external.JobExt.maxRunsPerJob=50

in jenkins.xml. After that the stage view was empty all the time.
Then I changed it to

-Dcom.cloudbees.workflow.rest.external.JobExt.maxRunsPerJob=5

and restarted Jenkins.
Until and including the completion of the 5th build of the pipeline job, the stage view did not show up. But after I started the sixth build, it worked again and also showed the first 5 builds.

For whatever reasons, on Linux it seems to work (even with 50 builds to be shown in the stage view).

possible duplicate of https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-40096

Same issue here, on Jenkins 2.45. Just migrated all my old chained jobs to pipeline scripts to discover they stop working after a restart. =[
Any tips here will be nice, thanks.

Possible duplicate of https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-39143

I think this is a duplicate of https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-39143

It appears some state is intermittently not being persisted to files.  The error doesn't occur until the jenkins master is restarted and it tries to reload state from disk.  It also appears this might be a windows only problem.  I don't believe this is a client/browser side issue.

It not only appears on windows, but on our Linux Jenkins instance too.

Deleting the mentioned build from the history helps to show the stage view again, but that s not exactly a solution to the cause of the problem.

possible duplicate according to the log