Performance guidelines
Improve the performance of your business rule applications by following these guidelines
for sizing artifacts and organizing projects.
Increase rule performance:
- Decision tables: Each row in a decision table constitutes a complete rule, which is run independently of the other rules in the table. Keep your decision tables manageable and efficient by limiting their size to 5,000 rows or fewer per table, and the total number of cells to 50,000 or fewer.
- Ruleflows: Use fewer than 100 tasks per ruleflow.
- Ruleset: The maximum number of rules when compiling a ruleset is around 50,000, and remember that each row in a decision table equals one rule. Otherwise, you might time out during ruleset generation.
- XOMs, BOMs and rulesets: Logs might increase processing time. Reduce them to the minimum number to get the best performance.
Watch your limits:
- Decision services: Limit the number of projects, optimally using 20 or fewer. Delete unused projects.
- Change activities: Limit the number of change activities per decision service release to a maximum of 200.
- Ruleset execution time: A ruleset should not take more than 120 seconds to run, otherwise a timeout occurs.
- Users: The more users on a cloud tenant, the slower the system runs. The first 10 users take two cores, and then one core per 10 users afterward.
The following table lists various ways to improve the performance of your business rule applications and where to look for more information.
| Approach® | Resource |
|---|---|
| Project design and architecture | |
| How you organize your business rule application into rule projects affects permissions and usability for business users, but also performance. | Setting up a decision service project hierarchy |
| You can improve build and runtime performance by defining build preferences and reducing the size of rule projects and business rule artifacts. | Guidelines for improving performance on large rule projects |
| System requirements | |
| Check that you meet the system requirements. | Detailed System Requirements
 |
| Rule Designer | |
| In Rule Designer, ruleset parsing takes much more time in debug mode than in regular run mode. | Ruelset debugging tools |
| Decision Center | |
| Decision Center is maintained by IBM®. | For inquiries about the performance of Decision Center, contact the support team. |
| Rule execution | |
| During the development phase of your application, you can enhance the performance of ruleset execution by creating efficient artifacts and choosing the execution mode for your artifacts. | Improving the performance of Rule Execution Server |