Hurry Up Already!!!

For a general application build, any usage of Pega activites / decisions / flows would be sufficient to accomplish a given task. In fact, taking the worst possible route to do something would still be better than not doing it. However, when troubleshooting an issue, tracer is an absolutely invaluable tool. One drawback of tracing is that it can be quite long and time consuming. Luckily for us, Pega has incorporated a number of options which can easily optimize tracer and speed up our troubleshooting time.

As a general rule of thumb, a developer can limit the tracer to trace only certain rulesets and/or certain rule types. This can easily cut the time in half when we only need to trace only our application rules, and not built-in Pega rules/rulesets.

If the above method is still not fast enough, the next best thing to do is to play around with the options below.

For the “Events to Trace”, the slowest part of tracing is listing each activity step. Sometimes we don’t care for each step of the activity. And when we do, we can always use the “Trace Open Rule” feature to focus on a particular activity that we are interested in. Disabling Activity Steps will make the tracer fly.

The next thing that can be done is un-checking the When rules start event. For most traces the start of a when rule serves no real purpose. Since we get our evaluations when the rule ends, we can easily survive with only the When rule end event.

Under the “General Options” section, the two options listed also have an impact on tracing speed. When the Abbreviate Events is checked, the tracer does not write the clipboard page into the tracer log. Since less data needs to be retrieved and stored in memory, the tracer run becomes quicker.

The Expand Java Pages option deals with properties that are of mode “Java Page”. As I have not personally encountered a scenario where properties are used in this mode, this option should still be noted for cases where there are properties of this mode.