TIMEOUTs with SBWP - SQL error 1013 occurred when accessing table "SWWUSERWI "

[Mike Gambier]

Hi WUGgers :)

This isn't a question as such, more an observation that some of you may have 
already had experience of at first hand.

We have a situation with the basic design of Workflow, particularly Work 
items and agent determination and how the system takes a snapshot of 
possible agents for a Work Item using table SWWUSERWI when the WI is issued.

Our problem is this: we are using Workflow in extremely high volumes 
(possibly higher than anywhere else in the world according to SAP) with an 
HR Org that is quite flat (numerous users assigned to a Position).

Due to the high number of updates to SWWUSERWI going on in the system the 
Inbox has a nasty tendancy to crash with either TIMEOUTs or deadlocks trying 
to set the NO_SEL flag (i.e. reserve or cancel reservation) when a user 
resevres or replaces a WI.

To give you an idea of the numbers involved we currently have millions of 
entries in SWWUSERWI, yes you read that right, millions.

We have 16 App Servers, 10 terabytes of memory and are the largest IS-U 
implementation in the world, but even with this power we can't get past 
bottlenecks like this.

Obviously SAP have expressed concerns about how many users we have assigned 
to Positions (they recommend no more than 50 usually whereas some of ours 
have 300+) which I have to say I agree with as it means for every WI we have 
a lot of SWWUSERWI entries to update each time.

But we are petitioning SAP to consider a rethink on the way SWWUSERWI is 
used at high volumes because it really doesn't much sense to take a snapshot 
of possible agents like this when we don't really care about agent 
assignments and timeslices.

As far as we are concerned SWWUSERWI should only ever have actual agents in 
it, not possible agents. In other words it suits us to rely on SWWORGTASK 
all the time for WIs that have not been selected.

No idea if we'll get far with this suggstion but we're open to other 
ideas...

MGT