Integration
This is an IBM Automation portal for Integration products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).
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Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.
IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.
ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.
Idea review. Thank you for taking the time to raise this suggestion. We understand the use case presented and can appreciate some of the benefits which the idea is trying to realise but we also want to express a feeling of caution about the potential for users to easily misunderstand the purpose of such a potential new setting. Given this feeling of reservation we are particularly keen to hear other views on this topic from the community. To expand on the concern ... In general the purpose of a policy is to abstract from the message flow itself a set of configuration properties that relate to a specific area of functionality, typically an external system of a particular kind. A workload management policy (WLM policy) is similar in concept but expresses global defaults for how a message flow can be scaled. In the case of additional instances, as noted there are different thread pools available - some input nodes provide the ability to assign a dedicated thread pool for that specific node instance, or alternatively to share in a pool of threads between multiple node instances in the message flow. This concept was initially introduced to the ACE product (precursor named product in fact) in order to avoid scenarios of "thread starvation" in particular when dealing with aggregation message flows ... having dedicated input message flow node thread pools could avoid the tendency for a message flow's shared thread pool to be unevenly split between different input nodes. So, having dedicated thread pool instances has a good technical benefit for some scenarios, but expressing this capability in a WLM policy would require a user to specify which input nodes the dedicated "node pool additional instances" should be applied to ... given that the policy is intended as a "global set of configuration" which can be associated with multiple flows, it is more than a little incongruous to make the configuration of the policy message flow specific. This suggests that perhaps the better approach is not to use the policy for this purpose at all and instead to use a BAR file deployment descriptor override to define the size of a particular input node's dedicated thread pool? For now we are placing the suggestion into Future Consideration status pending feedback from a wider set of users to help us assess the right business priority.