That is a broad question!

Jeff DeLong wrote:

 

The question is how to deploy and scale a large stateful CEP service. CEP services could be required to handle thousands or more events per minute, and hold millions of events in working memory (along with a huge number of facts). The memory requirements could be enormous (several gigabytes)

 

An initial approach to these sorts of requirements is to deploy the CEP service on its own dedicated SOA-P server, and configure it's VM sizing appropriately. What would be reasonable here? I.e. what is the largest reasonable single server JVM configuration? 6 GB RAM, 8 GB RAM, ...?

 

However, if the volume of events would overwhelm a single server, what are the options for scalability? Can a working memory be spread across VMs? Could Drools take advantage of a federated cache such as Infinispan? What other options are there to scale.

 

Even if a single server is capable of handling the load, what would a highly available topology look like? Could a second server be deployed with the same configuration, and configure a service invoker load balancing policy that always went to the first service if it were available?

Regarding memory, we have customers with up to 32Gb of memory running Drools, although I am not aware of any actually using over 20Gb. On 64 bits machines there is no real problem in increasing the heap if the memory is available.

Regarding topology, a WM can not be distributed over multiple JVMs. There is some research going on on using Infinispan cache, but there is nothing yet on versions up to Drools 5.1.

I think it is important to realize that competing products in general split and execute each and every query in a separate space with its own "local" memory. An analogy would be to create a separate knowledge base in drools for each rule/query and then spawn a separate session for each kbase. This is obviously sub-optimal as we would not benefit from inter-rule optimizations. So, we will probably have to try tunning large use cases by creating multiple kbases of "related" rules. This would allow us to easily distribute each kbase over different JVMs with their respective sessions.

HA is something we need to discuss in separate. The engine does not support HA internally as of 5.1. It can be implemented as a master/master HA using external tools, and that is how it is usually done today. Although, alternatives need to be developed for the future.

Do you know the road-map for Drools' experimental grid functionality? Is this to eventually provide for a distributed RETE incorporating HA?

Is there any update on this?

I am interested in the infinispan integration, using it as the working memory.