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2.2.2 Process Designer architecture best practices
This section presents best practices for the Process Designer.
Use a fast connection between Process Designer and Process Center
The Process Designer interacts frequently with the Process Center for authoring tasks. For
this reason, minimize network latency to provide optimal response times. Place the Process
Center in the same physical location as the Process Designer users. Also, place the Process
Center in the same physical location as its database. If you cannot relocate the Process
Center, you can remotely connect to the environment where the Process Center is physically
located and use the Process Designer through that mechanism.
Minimize use of Service Tasks
Where possible, call system lane tasks with Service No Task because Service Tasks have
significant performance costs. The potential performance benefit of executing Service Tasks
asynchronously is usually far outweighed by the additional overhead of Service Tasks,
because the Process Server persists the state and context to the database at transition
points. In particular, avoid patterns such as the following pattern:
JavaScript 1 Service Task 1 JavaScript 2 Service Task 2
If possible, avoid Service Tasks altogether, or switch to the following example to minimize the
number of times that state and context are persisted:
JavaScript 1 JavaScript 2 Service Tasks 1 and 2 combined
Use searchable business variables judiciously
Business variables add more overhead to the Process Server, so limit business data
searches to only those fields that need to be searchable in the Process Portal. As a general
guideline, rarely are more than 10 searchable variables required in a BPD. If your
implementation has more searchable variables than this, re-evaluate your design and
re-factor as needed to reduce the number of searchable variables.
Manage variable usage
Variables are persisted to the database when execution contexts are saved, which happens
fairly frequently (for example, when changing from BPD to service execution, and when
running each coach). These persistence operations are expensive. Minimize the persistence
cost in the following ways:
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Minimize the number of variables used.
Minimize the size of each variable.
Set variables, such as DB result sets, to null when they are no longer needed.
Minimize the number and size of variables that are passed to each task.
If industry-standard schema are being used (for example, ACORD or HIPAA), recognize
that these schema contain many fields, and use only the variables that are required from
the schema. If necessary, convert to or from the industry standard schema on the edges of
the application to avoid unnecessary persistence cost in the BPD processing.
Chapter 2. Architecture best practices 9