Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide for Financial Services > Monitoring and Tuning Performance > Tuning Workflow Policies for Performance >

Optimal Sleep Interval for Workflow Policy Groups

By creating groups with similar polling intervals, you can assign the workflow policy group to a Workflow Agent process with a polling rate that matches the workflow policy group. Different polling intervals can be assigned to each workflow policy group using the Sleep Time parameter (see Workflow Policies Server Administration for more information on Workflow Policies).

After Workflow Agents process all requests, the agent processes sleep for the interval specified by this argument before processing begins again. You should set the sleep intervals as large as is possible, but at an interval that still meets your business requirements.

You should adjust the sleep interval for each Workflow Agent process to meet the requirements of each workflow policy group. For example, workflow policy group A contains accounts that require a response to a Severity 1 service request within 10 minutes. Workflow policy group B contains policies that require a customer follow-up call within 14 days. Workflow policy group A is very time-critical, so you could set the sleep interval to 60 seconds so that the assigned Workflow Policies instance polls frequently. Workflow policy group B is not as time-critical, so you could set the sleep interval to 48 hours and the Workflow Policy instance can still meet its commitments.

Another example where optimal configuration of the Sleep Time parameter may be required is in the case of multiple users who may need to update the same record. If you have, for example, a workflow policy that monitors service requests and you have multiple users that retrieve and modify open service request records, you need to set the sleep time parameter so that users will have enough time to update the text fields.

If the sleep interval is not set high enough, you may encounter an error message stating "The selected record has been modified by another user since it was retrieved. Please continue." and you will lose your changes as the new field values for this record are displayed.


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