Symptoms and Causes of Poor Business Process Execution Time

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There are many symptoms and causes of poor business process execution time.

Symptoms of increasing business process execution time include:
  • Performance Statistics Report showing the Min (ms), Max (ms), and Average (ms) time increasing for business processes, activities, and internal system activities. To access this report, navigate to Operations > System > Performance > Statistics.
  • Increasing business process execution time in the wf.log in the install_dir/logs directory.

Determining the cause of increasing business process execution time may require you to investigate many areas of the system and the way in which you are implementing Sterling B2B Integrator.

Typically, the cause of increasing business process execution time is because of:
  • The database is full or is receiving too many requests
  • Improperly designed business processes
Improperly designed business processes may involve the following issues:
  • Business process persistence levels are set too high, which causes too much data to be stored to the database.

    For more information about persistence levels, refer to the topic Changing Persistence Levels.

  • Unnecessary service invocations, which use resources that can otherwise be used by other Sterling B2B Integrator business processes or components.
  • Improperly tuned cache properties, which cause the business process to query the database or disk for information that can be provided in a queue.

    For more information about caches, refer to the topic Resolving Inefficient Cache Usage.

  • A full database or database maintenance issues, which cause longer query times and increased execution times.

    If you find that all your business processes are experiencing an increase in execution time, you may also find that your database is full or is receiving many requests, causing the entire processing to slow down.

  • Unnecessary loops, which cause the use of resources that can otherwise be used by other Sterling B2B Integrator business processes or components.
  • Improperly written XPath statements, which use resources that can otherwise be used by other Sterling B2B Integrator business processes or components.

    Use relative paths when writing XPath statements, for example, write PurchaseOrder/text instead of /ProcessData/PurchaseOrder/text().

    In addition, do not use // at the beginning of an XPath statement because this causes the entire process data to be searched, and slows down the search time significantly.

  • Running services in modes other than the literal mode, which is significantly faster than the other modes available.

  • Using older services and adapters instead of newer and more efficient ones, which may combine the functionality of more than one older service or adapter into one service.

    Note: Adapters and services that are retiring are placed on the Retiring stencil in the Graphical Process Modeler. Although adapters and services on the Retiring stencil are available for use, if you are designing new business processes, use the newer adapters and services in your business processes.

Determining the Causes of Poor Business Process Execution Time

To determine the cause of increasing business process execution time:
  • Review the wf.log file in the install_dir/logs file for time and date stamp information showing increases in execution time, and errors in each business process.
  • Review the Performance Statistics Report by navigating to Operations > System > Performance > Statistics. This report shows the number of invocations and processing time for each business process and system activity.
  • Review business processes that show increasing execution time for improper design, mode, or XPath statements, for example, using a Command Line adapter to retrieve data instead of a File System adapter. The Command Line adapter uses more resources than the File System adapter, which can accomplish the same goal in some situations. Or, in some situations, you can create an XPath statement in an Assign service, which will replace the need for both the Command Line adapter and the File System adapter.

    Also, use relative paths in XPath statements. For example, write PurchaseOrder/text instead of /ProcessData/PurchaseOrder/text(). In addition, do not use // at the beginning of an XPath statement because this causes the entire process data to be traversed.