Implementing Pass-Through Threads

[Levy Lazarre]

Hello all,

I have a large ADT thread that is currently sending to about 10 destinations. I am contemplating breaking this thread into 3 pass-through threads that would then forward to the end-points.

I have a couple of questions for those who may have undertaken a similar kind of transformation:

1. Since the middle threads will be in the same site and same process as the original sending thread, is there any performance gain to be expected from the new configuration?

2. If so, what is the most efficient way to implement the middle (pass-through) threads (protocol, configuration)?

Inbound —-> middle1 —> dest1, dest2, dest3

Inbound

---

> middle2 —> dest4, dest5, dest6 …

Thanks.

Topic

[Robert Milfajt]

From my past experience.

1.  You want to balance the load on the middles, so do some analysis on volumes for your different destinations and try to split evenly among the “middles”.

2.  If its not obvious, you need to put each middle in its own process.

3.  What we did was raw route the ADT in to different “middle-out” threads in the same process, then using TCP/IP to local host, routed back to “middle-in” threads and run any Xlates in the new process.  However, the file protocol may be more efficient.  It all depends on your system resources, etc.  For us it was better to tax the NICs and not the disk.

Hope this helps,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Levy Lazarre]

Thanks, Robert.

I will keep all of this in mind. I actually have done as you described in 3. with some other threads, but I was trying to see if this could be done without creating additional processes. The TCP option is definitely a better choice for us than the file protocol.

[Jim Kosloskey]

Levy,

We have a site that receives our ADT and ONLY routes that to inter-site connections. Each of these connections are localhost. In the receving site the inbound connection is localhost and this is where the actual Xlates, etc. involved in the message building exist and the threads that actually connect to the receiving system

We have been using this kind of architecture (multi-site) for all of our integrations for nearly 10 year – and before that at Oakwood we used the multi-site architecture for another 5 years.

This allows us the level of granularity of control that we ned to balance out workload, associate integration customer characteristics, etc.

In 5.8 inter-site communication is improved it appears.

So we use multiple sites rather than multiple processes in one site.

It might be an oportune time for you to consider multi-site if you have not already.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Levy Lazarre]

Jim,

Indeed, we have an upgrade to version 5.8 coming soon and I am definitely planning on using the new inter-site communication facilities. Currently, we are using the hop-send/hop-receive paradigm to route messages between processes, but we have come to the point where we need to break into more sites.

Thanks!

[Author]

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