ALBPM - Batch events and Load Balancing

Question

Hi,
We are planning to design a BPM solution for one of our current applications. The need we have is that the BPM solution should be able to start process instances in a batch mode. We receive about 25,000 to 30,000 events in a batch file and we need to start one BPM process instance for each record. Currently we are evaluating the ALBPM, but trying to figure out a best approach to do this. Also I would like to know what will be be ther better options to configure load balance instances of BPM for this scenario. I could not find any documents from BEA to address these. Anybody tried or came across this situation? Any documents/examples that can answer or suggest options for the batch modes? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First of all, load balancing applies at various levels.
1) load balancing at the horizontal level is only achieved by creating a WLS cluster and deploying the BPM engine in the cluster.
2) load balancing at the vertical level can be achieved by creating many BPM engines and deploying processes on each Engine, this will distribute instances between the engines.
if you need to create 25k instances of the same process in a batch, there is no problem, it will queue the executions and dispatch them to the available threads.
A good approach would be to create instances in smaller chunks, to do this you can create a "batch process" that can get the file, split it in smaller chunks and process one chunk at a time. An important thing to consider when working with so many instances is that the transactions tend to get bigger and longer, so if you have a huge chunk, you can get a transaction timeout or a DB exception because of redo logs sizes.
Hope this helps!
MAriano Benitez
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