[rules-users] Drools Expert scalability

[Dieter D'haeyere]

I have a question regarding the scalability of Drools Expert.

Situation is as follows:
- Individual cases have to be evaluated by the rule engine (result is a
tarrif that could be refunded).
- the application receives the cases in flat files with 50K cases each.  The
app parses them and sends them one by one to the rule engine
- the application receives multiple batch files per day.
- seperate cases can be dependant on each other.  Eg. if max 1 refund can be
done to an actor, two cases about the same actor can not run in parallel.
- loads will be huge, scalability is an issue

So, what I see now
- Drools Server can be run as a server
- It is possible to have multiple instances of drools server, this would
allow to evaluate cases in parallel.  But ... this can cause problems (as
stated before): you can't run any two cases in parallel.  Preprocessing
could be done by the application (eg. determining the order in which to
present the cases to the rule engine) but over time extra constraints can
appear so preprocessing would have to be maintained continuously.

So, this is an issue :)

My questions are:
- is it eg possible to organise rules such that different rules can run on
different rule engines.  Like that you could have some kind of pipeline.
Maybe this could be defined with ruleflow ? Compare to the pipelines in
CPU's (for executing machine code).  Could you eg. relate one server
instance to one set of rules and another server instance to the sequential
next set of rules ?  How would you configure that (performance is of course
important).
- Or, is it possible to split rules but not as a pipeline but in parallel...
like a 'fork .. join' .  Again, this could be configured with ruleflow?
- What do you see as the best way to solve this issue ?


Any help is welcome,
Dieter D'haeyere.
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