You notice table SWWCNTP0 growing at a much faster pace than the other workflow runtime tables.
Cause
- You have not implemented a work item archiving strategy in your production system.
- You use multiline container elements within your workflows which contain large amounts of data.
Resolution
- Please put a WORKITEM archiving strategy in place so you can keep your workflow table size under control. Use transaction SARA and archiving object WORKITEM in order to archive work items. Please review note 573656 for more information. The lower the number of entries in the workflow runtime tables the better the performance of the workflow engine. Table SWWCNTP0 is one of the workflow runtime tables.
- Deleting unneeded table entries - Run report RSWWWIDE_DEP in order to remove entries in the workflow runtime tables that do not exist in SWWWIHEAD. You can run RSWWWIDE_DEP for all the tables listed in order to clean up the tables which include SWWWIHEAD, SWWLOGHIST and SWWCNTP0 among others. In this case please run it for table SWWCNTP0. After a delete or archive it is usually a good idea to do a Reorg. See note 72873.
- Containers - From release Basis 640 onwards container values of work items are written to table SWWCNTP0 by default rather than tables SWW_CONT and SWW_CONTOB. This is called XML persistence and the data is stored in an XML table which improves the performance of the workflow execution. The size of table SWWCNTP0 will depend on how many work items are generated in the system and how much data is contained in each container element of each work item container. If you have multiline container elements that contain many entries (At runtime) you need to establish if all this data is needed in the workflow execution. If not then you need to revisit the design and binding of your workflow definitions. Table SWWCNTP0 will be smaller when you have less work items in your system (Archiving) and less data in your container elements (Workflow design). If you wish to use the old container behaviour (Fill tables SWW_CONT & SWW_CONTOB) you can change the settings for the persistence profile of a workflow via the Workflow Builder (Transaction SWDD) => Basic Data (Button with Hat icon) => Version Dependent tab => Control tab. Look in the 'Persistence profile' tab and you can change the settings. However XML persistence is better regarding workflow performance.
This information can also be seen in the Knowledge Based Article 1552169.
