[rules-users] Functionality/Performance Test Results

[Robert Crawford]

On Aug 27, 2007, at 11:15 AM, Yang Song wrote:

> Hi, Robert,
>
> I am very interested in the database access part, because I am also  
> considering to add the database access code into my rule. But my  
> current concern is the performance.
>
> It would be very appreciated if can let me know how many times of  
> database access is in your whole test suite, which cost 6 seconds?  
> Is it always validating the same user or randomly picking different  
> users to validate --  if using the same query, database may get  
> result cached which will result a better performance? Did you add  
> any arbitrary object caching in your java code for performance  
> optimization?

Basically, the test was to validate the configuration for each of 19  
sites. The configuration for each site consists of about 1500  
records, and the validation is extremely simple -- is the value for  
one particular field valid for this particular site. Each site needed  
to query a complete set of data; the two queries involved in that are  
what took 6 seconds.

Our database is not known for its performance. Apparently it gets the  
data back to us pretty quick, but it takes a second or two to set up  
the query. And, yes, we're caching database connections. We're  
constantly debating with our DBAs over database performance.

In this particular case, a better strategy for querying the data is  
to load the configuration for multiple sites at once. The rules  
wouldn't be that much more complicated (one or two additional  
conditions), and we'd be hitting the database less frequently. I'd  
bet I could get this test down to under 30 seconds with this  
approach, maybe even down to under 10. Trying to write the procedural  
code to handle this would be difficult, and still wouldn't give us  
the flexibility the users are asking for.

I've not tried hitting the database during rule evaluation, but may  
have to in future phases of the project. Let me know how it goes for  
you!