Oracle EBS Applications utilize a sophisticated batch scheduling and processing mechanism known as the Concurrent Managers. This batch processing system performs many vital functions within the EBS Applications system environment including reporting, managing data processing and Workflow activity plus several other critical business and system tasks. Many of these processes have a voracious appetite for CPU and memory resources, which can bring a typical well-configured application tier server to its knees during peak operating times. This is further compounded by the fact that most small to medium scale EBS implementations typically run the Concurrent Managers on the same application server that runs the web and forms services that support user sessions.
An EBS feature that has been available for quite some time but is not very well understood is the ability to configure the Concurrent Manager process to run in a distributed architecture environment. This is known as Distributed Concurrent Processing (DCP). DCP spreads the Oracle EBS Concurrent Manager activities across multiple application tier nodes. Utilizing a DCP architecture allows you to either completely separate concurrent processing from user UI activity or you could just move some of the taxing concurrent tasks to a separate node, isolating the more intense requests from standard user processing. DCP also provides a built-in high-availability feature that allows concurrent managers to migrate (failover) to a surviving node if one of the concurrent processing nodes goes down. It can then return the concurrent managers to the failed node when it becomes available again.
DCP is often confused with Oracle’s PCP (Parallel Concurrent Processing) which was originally intended for running the Concurrent Managers in a parallel architecture utilizing Oracle Database RAC clusters. While this capability still exists, it is very rarely used and DCP is much easier to implement. Oracle actually now refers to DCP as “PCP for Non-RAC Environments”.
Information regarding setting up and implementing DCP can be found in the following notes available from Oracle Support:
How to Setup and Test Failover of PCP on Non-RAC Environments. (Doc ID 743716.1)
How to Activate Parallel Concurrent Processing – Background Facts and Setup Steps [ID 602899.1]
For more details or if you need assistance implementing Distributed Concurrent Processing, please contact us at Perficient. We can assist you with all of your Oracle EBS architecture and implementation needs and can help you to “Spread the Load”.
