Hello everyone.

 

I’ve got a question regarding the performance of Drools in STREAM mode. It seems to me, that either Drools is not very fast here, or the problem is with the rule itself.

 

This is the rule.

 

rule "ABC”

            no-loop

            when

                        $a : Aevent()

                        $b : Bevent(id == $a.id)

                        $c : Cevent(id == $a.id)

            then

                        retract($c);

                        retract($a);

                        retract($b);

                        …(actions)

end

 

It basically says: act upon every group of A, B and C events with the same ids. The retract statements will make sure, none of these events will get matched again by this rule. Side question: is there any possibility to do this rule without the retractions?

 

Regarding the performance:

If I put the arriving events in this sequence: A(x), B(x), C(x) where x is the number of events being sent. No other events than A, B and C with the same id being sent. And I repeat this sequence a small number of runs (12 times in a row), then it will take Drools:

 

For x=8, on average 3 seconds to detect all 96 patterns,

for x=16, on average 30 seconds to detect all 192 patterns.

 

But the average is not very meaningful. Sometimes the Engine does it in (x=16) 10 seconds, and sometimes it takes him over a minute to detect everything, sometimes it takes him nearly forever for no reason. We tested this on different machines and we cannot predict a “stable” behaviour. We figured out, that this instability might come from fireUntilHalt, which we invoke from a separate thread. Some ABC groups get detected faster than others and the total duration is totally variable as stated before.

When calling fireAllRules upon every insert, the total duration is stable (4,5 sec for x=16 and 12 runs) and also the detection time for every ABC group seems to be even.

 

So a few questions: whats the problem with fireUntilHalt? Are we using it the wrong way? If fireAllRules is used after every insert, can rules be triggered by actions of other rules? For event stream processing a solution that fires almost always is desirable.

 

Why is the overall performance so poor? If I do x=32 and do just one run, which means just a total of 32*3= 96 events being sent and it takes him 2,6 seconds to detect all 32 patterns. That’s not very fast, is it?

 

I’m using Drools 5.1.1 and the latest JDK.

It would be nice to get some opinions.

 

Best regards,

Oliver