Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide for Financial Services > Performance Tuning > Tuning of Workflow Processes >

Overheads

Overhead varies depending on whether you are running workflows locally or in Workflow Process Manager.

Running Workflows Locally

A workflow instance—that is, one run of a workflow definition—can run within a UI object manager (UI/OM). In this case, the workflow runs locally, within the current thread that the logged-in user is using. This means that if N users are connected and they all need to run a workflow definition, the definition would run in that user thread. In this mode, Workflow adds a fixed overhead (100-200K) to the user memory (usually referred to as the model) plus memory taken up by other objects (such as business components) contained in the tasks within that workflow.

Running Workflows in Workflow Process Manager

The workflow itself runs within a separate object manager (the application server process), which uses a fixed set of resources (MaxMTS, MaxTasks) to schedule the workflow. The Workflow Process Manager (WFProcMgr) is a multithreaded process that runs multiple workflows and is more scalable because it uses a pool of threads and models.

Generally, the mode of the workflow used depends on what the application is trying to achieve. It is generally recommended that you try to schedule a workflow task in the WFProcMgr, especially if the results of a run are not immediately needed.

Asynchronous Mode

Use of the asynchronous mode comes with the following pros and cons:

Pros

Cons
  • All user threads are not loaded.
  • On error, you must look at the log files because there is no automatic notification.
  • More scalable as long as:
  • The SRM could have a timeout or retry feature.
 
  • There are maximum N simultaneously connected users
  • There are maximum X simultaneous running workflows
  • If X is smaller than N, then a WFProcMgr with X tasks can handle a much larger pool (N) of users
  • Slightly more latency. Additional cost (minimal) of one request per response.


 Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide for Financial Services 
 Published: 22 May 2003