Question

Photo of Scott Conger

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Large Workflow - Performance

I'm curious... what's the largest workflow you all have created?  Do you have any performance issues?  We have one that's fairly large.  32 activities. It runs fine but editing the workflow configuration is painfully slow.

  • Photo of Jeremy Turgeon

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    We've also experienced this issue.  The more actions or activities in a workflow, the slower it is to edit.

    • Scott Conger

      Good to know, it's not just me. I may look into adding an action that fires off another workflow, so we can break a large workflow down into smaller ones. Do you think anyone else would be interested in that?

    • Scott Conger

      We only need an entity (usually a person) passed to the next workflow. That should be straight forward. But perhaps if we also figured out how to pass the original workflow guid, then the new workflow could get whatever it needs from run sql. Would that cover your scenarios too?

    • Jeremy Turgeon

      Depending on the situation, that might work. Many of our existing workflows use a lot of attributes though. In those instances, it wouldn't be as useful.

    • Scott Conger

      I think we will have for solution on this in the next couple days. It will pass a person as the entity to the second workflow. It will also cycle through the attributes in workflow 1 and workflow 2, if any of the keys match, it will pre-populate them in workflow 2. I think that would cover your scenario, correct? We have the baseline working, already. We will be working on adding the attribute key matching, next.

    • Jon Edmiston

      Something else to consider is that we can/will be working on performance. You might consider crafting the workflows in a way that optimizes clarity vs performance. You may have to live with some slow performance in the short-term. But it will only get faster as we optimize. Just a thought...

    • Scott Conger

      Good point. Since your post, we've streamlined it. We cut about a third off the workflow. It's in production now. There is a lot more we want to do to it but probably need to revisit what can be put in custom actions, instead of directly in the workflow.


      That said, even today, we ran into a new situation where a custom action that calls a second workflow, solves the problem. We got distracted with our launch but we'll probably finish that custom action soon.

    • Jon Edmiston

      Feel free to push your action to core if you think it's reusable. Sounds like something that a lot of folks would need.