Workflow process does not complete for 3500 but works for about 10 records

Question

Hi Gurus,
I am a novice in workflow. Pls bear if the questions are very basic.
We have a old custom workflow process which is inistaed by a PL/SQL procedure
WF_ENGINE.CreateProcess ---
WF_ENGINE.StartProcess ---
COMMIT; ---
Now this process has run for over 6-7 years but has always processed max upto 8 or 10 records at a time. Now we had about 4000 records in a table and the process was running for more than 4 days now and it has been termiinated.
I could not see any new item_keys. Is it because we have a commit only at the end.
This process has 3 sub processes. they are connected by 'AND' and then we have an 'End' node.
The first sub-process is simple and we can see a record in wf_items .
Howver no records are there in wf_items for the 2nd and 3rd sub processes.
How can we check the point where it has hanged. Querying Status monitor just gives the first sub-process that has completed. How to debug for these cases.
This has always worked for small volumes. Now we have about 4000 records and we face this problem
The process actually checks data from the table and based on some conditions , it send 5 different notifications to 5 different mail groups. So we expect about 4000*5 mails to be sent.
Any help is welcome.
Thanks,
L
Edited by: 901929 on 20-Jul-2012 01:38
Edited by: 901929 on 20-Jul-2012 01:39

Answer 1

L,
Please check the following:
1. Since this is pure PLSQL you can have a SQL script where you enable a database event to get a trace and then run tkprof on the output to spot any performance problem. You can use something like:
alter session set tracefile_identifier='Background' max_dump_file_size='unlimited' events '10046 trace name context forever, level 12';
begin
wf_engine.CreateProcess(...);
wf_engine.StartProcess(...);
end;
commit;
alter session set events '10046 trace name context off';
select fnd_debug_util.get_trace_file_name() tracefile from dual;
2. Do you happen to know if WF runtime tables are being purged regularly? If this is not done you can expect serious performance problems. If this is WF Apps embedded you need to clean data using the concurrent request Purge Obsolete Workflow runtime data, if not then you can use the APIs in package WF_PURGE.
3. You will only find one record in WF_ITEMS for this process if those sub-processes belong to the same item type
4. About the notifications, make sure you are not running into this design problem: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleworkflow/entry/looping_within_a_workflow_process
Regards,
Alejandro