Performance Tuning Guide - EMC Community Network

Planning Capacity and Sizing
Planning for workflow database tables
Workflow cycle times and the number of activities per workflow impacts sizing of supporting
workflow database tables (dmi_workitem, dm_queue_item, dmi_package, dmc_wfsd_*). Figure 5,
page 17 illustrates the difference between a system with 100K workflows, each with 10 activities and
a cycle time of 1 day, and a system with same number of workflows but with 100 activities per
workflow and cycle times of 365 days. The system with cycle times of 1 day generates no more than 1
million rows in the workflow supporting tables (dmi_workitem, for example) whereas the system
with cycle times of 365 days generates more than 3.6 billion rows in the workflow supporting tables.
When sizing your supporting workflow database tables, consider not only the number of workflows
and activities, but the cycle times as well.
Figure 5. Cycle time versus throughput
Characterizing content
The relationship between content and capacity planning differs depending on whether content is
taken to mean the number of documents or size of the documents. For example, two clients can
both have a 500 TB of content. In one case, 10 billion emails (50 KB each) comprise the content
whereas in another case 100 master files (5 TB movie productions in high definition format) comprise
the content. In the former, the potential flow of repository objects and process activities related to
the 500 TB of content is much greater.
EMC Documentum xCP 1.0 Performance Tuning Guide 17