Question

Troubleshooting workflow performance issue - difference between activity Duration and Work Duration ?

Workflow

Updated January 7

asked on December 30, 2024

Hi all,

I am trying to find out why some of my workflows take a longer time than expected.

When I am looking in the workflow execution details ("Activities" tab) there are a few things I dont quite understand and I am wondering if someone could explain what is seems to me like inconsistencies:

- The sum of the Activity durations in the Activities tab is less than the Workflow duration in the "Workflow Details" tab

- There is a large difference between the Activity Duration and Work Duration columns in the "Activities" tab. Any idea what they actually mean and why is that ?

- The 2 longest activities are "<WorkflowName>_Children*" and "<WorkflowName>_Children_Children*". These are not actual activities in the workflow... any idea what they mean ?

Thank you for your help !

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Replies

replied on January 6

The activity duration is the time spent doing actual work. The total workflow duration includes the time between the workflow start and end. This could include wait time for activities with conditions or time spent in queues waiting for the Workflow server to pick up the activity for execution.

"Children" activities are usually created by complex activities like conditional decisions or For Each loops.

This is likely not the best way to troubleshoot performance issues. Can you describe the problem you are seeing?

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replied on January 6

Thank you Miruna

We have some relatively complex workflows that perform document import and classification by batch. Document classification is done as one workflow for each document (so no loops here), and I noticed that some days the average completion time for the classification workflows is longer... not too much, say from 0.5 seconds to 1 seconds, but for a batch with thousands of documents, this adds up quite quickly, although nothing critical yet (I am doing this mostly proactively).

So I wanted to understand which steps are adding the most time but it is always the "children" actvities that are by far the longest, so it was not very helpful.

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replied on January 6

Workflow does not have built-in document import, what are you using to bring documents in? If they come in in bursts, you might be seeing the effects of the execution queue. There's only a limited number of slots per CPU for actively running activities, so the rest of the documents would wait a little bit.

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replied on January 7

We are using Import Agent for the document import, but we are actually starting to classify documents only when the whole batch is imported.

I do agree with you though, that it might have to do with the execution queue, or maybe the database response times.

Thank you for your precisions I'll leave it here for now as current performance is still acceptable for what we need to do

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replied on January 7

Just an idea, but Quick Fields can classify imported documents (by using the Laserfiche Capture Engine scan source), and would be probably be much, much faster at it.

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Troubleshooting workflow performance issue - difference between activity Duration and Work Duration ?

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