Designing processes - EMC Community Network

Designing the Process
Performance and stability of executing automated
workflow activities
The Process Engine’s multi-threaded workflow allows concurrent execution of automated workflow
activities. The workflow agent responds to Content Server notifications and can execute queries based
on a polling interval to claim work for its worker threads to execute.
There are only two ways the workflow worker threads can execute the work:
• Notification: They get notified through shared memory inter-process communication (IPC).
• Claim query: The workflow master runs the UPDATE query that claims available items for
working and then distributes the work to workers.
If the automated workflow activities are not executing on time or never at all, check for the following:
• The claim query can take too long to execute.
This can occur when the number of worker threads is increased to a high number (for example, 100)
with the intent that more workers results in better performance. However, with this increase, the
UPDATE query executes as a nested loop in the underlying RDBMS, pinning the RDBMS CPU.
This dramatically increases the time that it takes to execute the claim query. Check the statspack for
top queries and if the UPDATE on dmi_workitem_s is taking a long time, then it is a confirmation
of the problem.
• Content Server is configured for high availability.
With a Content Server high availability configuration, confirm that a unique dm_server_config
object is specified for each content server. If you have two workflow masters operating using the
same serverconfig object, then workflow automated activities execution can fail. To fix this problem,
ensure that each content server has a unique serverconfig object.
• You are not using the no_op method from Process Builder 6.5 or later.
In Process Builder 6.5, the default DocBasic no_op method to run the automated activities
such as splits, joins, and data mappers was changed. If you are using an older version of
dm_noop_auto_method, switch to the newer version of dm_noop_auto_method_java.
Large SDTs and performance
Creating large SDTs or adding many SDTs to a process degrades performance in TaskSpace task
lists. Try to create SDTs based on logically related objects and consolidate attributes if it makes
sense within the process.
Deployment considerations
• Migrating or upgrading Process Builder, page 61
• Process versioning, page 61
60 EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform Version 1.6 Best Practices Guide