[rules-users] Drools memory use issues

[Ron Kneusel]

Greetings!

I'm using Drools 4 and have a simple test setup with 4 rules.  If I run with a few facts (simple objects that hold a type and a floating point value only) everything works as advertised.  If I bump the number of facts up to 100 it runs most of the time without changing the defaults on the virtual machine.  However, if I change the number of facts to 500 and change the virtual machine memory limits to 1024 MB the engine grinds to a halt and eventually dies with an out of memory error.

What are the reasonable limits for Drools in terms of facts in the working memory and number of rules?  

I will try a test with hundreds of rules today but I was very surprised, and disappointed, to see that so few facts eat so much memory.  The project my company needs Drools for will likely have to run the engine on a working memory with about 100..150 facts and do so every 1 to 2 seconds.  Can Drools keep up?  How can performance be improved?

Thanks!

Ron

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