Couple of weeks ago I saw
a great presentation by Joram Barrez of Dolmen called "The Full Stack". Basically he showed how they selected jBPM and SeeWhy and composed it into a full BPM solution. Since I went to the event with not much expectations, this was a pleasant surprise. Things became even more interesting when Joram showed the performance tests they did to see if jBPM would meet their demands. We wanted to do those tests for ages, but never got to it. So big thanks, Joram for sharing them with us !
As you might know process execution in jBPM can happen with or without persistence. These measurements are done *with* persistence, as this is the most common way of how jBPM is used.
He started with the simplest process. That took 2 milliseconds to execute.
Then a processes that grew longer and longer:
Then he verified the effect of simple and complex process concurrency:
Amen.
So even this complex process runs with only 12 ms overhead of jBPM ! Awsome. Even I was surprised :-)
And the last test was a complete realistic process of handling a hospital report. That took 3 milliseconds to execute.
All of this shows that the overhead created by jBPM runtime process management is really small. Doing the statemanagement of such processes yourself will lead to a lot more development time, and in many cases, the performance will not be as optimized as just using jBPM.
This only highlights the performance evaluation part of the talk. I definitely recommend to
read his blog post about the full contents of
Joram's presentation.
The jBPM Community Day in Dublin is a great opportunity to learn more about jBPM, the Process Virtual Machine or JBoss in general. The core jBPM developers and key members of the community will be there in a relaxed atmosphere. It's just friday afternoon on June 6th. There will be some informative sessions, guinness entertainment and plenty of breaks to network and talk to others in the jBPM community. Lunch and evening meal included and it's free ! What more could you want :-) 
