Using Wait and Sleep Services Appropriately

The Sleep service holds onto its processing thread (using more system resources), while the Wait service does not. As a general rule, use the Wait service instead of the Sleep service for wait times longer than one minute.

Refer to the following information for the applicability of each service to your business needs:

• For short periods, the Sleep service may be more efficient, because in this case, the system does not need to requeue the process.
• Using a Wait service is likely to make more system resources available.
• A large number of "sleeping" business processes can exhaust resources, resulting in Sterling B2B Integrator being unable to execute more processes. Thus, ensuring that very few processes are sleeping at any one time, and that sleep periods are limited, is critical.
• The Sleep service enables you to set an exact length of time for the process to sleep. The Wait service is far less precise; depending on your Sterling B2B Integrator configuration, the Wait service may wait an extra 10 minutes. If timing is critical, use the Sleep service.