Setting Different Priority Levels

[cspadola]

Does anyone know if it is possible to set certain priority levels for processes in OTM?

We have a few different customers in our OTM implementation and near the end of each day, we submit a lot of bulk plan requests from different users for the different customers. We have determined that we would like to set different priority levels based on each customer. Currently, it seems that one customer's bulk plans (which are mostly sent automatically) take priority over the manually submitted bulk plan requests.

Is there anywhere this can be checked (and modified) in OTM? The difference between the one customer that has highest priority is that it is mostly auto-planned including the bulk planning. We would like to lower this priority and let the manually submitted bulk plans have higher priority.

Is this possible?

[chrisplough]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

No - unfortunately, it's not - though I've hoped for a type of QoS or Process Prioritization within OTM for a while.

There are a couple of options, which may get you what you want, though:

• Configuring custom Thread Groups and assigning certain tasks to them
• Setting up SCA (scalability) to split out either certain functions (like bulk plans) or certain domains (for certain customers) onto separate servers.

--Chris

[cspadola]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

Hi Chris...thanks for the response. Funny thing is, you also answered another question that I had in the past that Oracle gave us a different answer about.

When we were contemplating SCA here, we did some testing and found that adding an extra APP server was not really worth the investment based on the load of our current (single) App server. We already use 2 web servers that are load balanced as part of our set up.

One reason we considered SCA was to split out certain functions (namely bulk plans) but at the time Oracle told us that this was not yet possible. This was just a couple of months ago. I have set up SCA in the past but did not realise that you can direct specific functions to each App server.

Are you saying that this is possible? If so, is there documentation on how to do this (besides the SCA set up guide)?

[chrisplough]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

Using SCA to split out certain functionality is definitely possible, though it hasn't been used in production, to my knowledge. You'll need to ensure that you're on OTM v5.5 CU05 RU01 for best results, though.

Whether this works for you depends on how your data is segregated, though -- there's a high risk of data contention and locking when using SCA.

Before you go to far into SCA, though, you should ensure that you're running on the most efficient hardware, OS and App server - since those are less expensive ways to increase performance. Currently the best platform is Intel (certain CPU models), Linux and WebLogic.

Unfortunately, no - there's little documentation on this other than the SCA setup guide.

[cspadola]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

We plan to upgrade from our current 5.5 to CU05 in the new year so perhaps this is best re-visited at that time. I'd be interested to see if we can get this to work here as our bulk planning is (sometimes) a major bottleneck and the 2 thread limit can slow us down sometimes. If we can throw all the bulk plans to another server (and raise the thread count) I'm sure there will be some happier planners over here.

Thanks for the info.

[chrisplough]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

It's definitely an option. Again - just keep in mind that your data setup is important. Another potential bottleneck are agents, and how they're running (and possibly causing blocks) during bulk plans. You can monitor your Business Object blocking using the MediatorDiagServlet.

--Chris

[cspadola]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

And now back to my original question on this thread...

Although there is no setting in OTM to set priority, it does appear that priorities are sometimes set - not sure what this is based on.

We have 4 customer implementations here - 2 run in the same domain (ABC), the other 2 run in different domain (EU) each in their own sub-domain (EU/DEF and EU/XYZ). One of the 2 customers in the ABC domain is mostly auto-process....from order integration, to planning (bulk planning) and tender notification. The other customer in the same ABC domain is mostly manual planning and processing. The other 2 customers are also mostly manual planning.

We have experienced recently that when we have a queue of bulk plans (common for the way we do business here), that the 3 manually planned customer bulk plans wait in line and get processed as first come, first serve. However, even if there is a queue of 10 (for example) bulk plans, the auto-process customer bulk plans always get to the front of the line. That's not an issue most days but sometimes this customer sends many orders or order updates at the same time that the manually planned customer operations are doing the majority of their bulk planning.

So, what happens is that the planners manually submit their orders to be bulk planned but must wait until all the auto-process bulk plans are done before their manual ones get started. We would actually like to set this in the opposite way - the manual bulk plans should get priority every time over the auto-bulk plans.

I hadn't started here yet when this customer was implemented and I am not sure how this all happened. If someone knows where I should start to look for this, it will be very helpful and appreciated.

[cspadola]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

Hi Chris...what is the URL I should use to check the MediatorDiagServlet?

[chrisplough]

Re: Setting Different Priority Levels

Quite honestly, I haven't seen the same behavior. If it is happening, though, I can only assume it would be at the code level within . So outside of working with Oracle support/development or decompiling the code (not legal) - I'm not sure how you could further investigate.

MediatorDiagServlet - http://otm.mavenwire.com/GC3/glog.webserver.mediator.MediatorDiagServlet

Here's more details:

http://www.otmfaq.com/forums/f27/application-server-out-memory-glog-webserver-mediator-mediatordiagservlet-1032/

--Chris