Enabling Async History in Flowable – Issue with Job Creation

Flowable Engine
1

Team,

I’m working with Flowable 7.1.0 and Spring Boot 3.5.3, and I’ve observed that most of our use cases involve synchronous execution, where the process completes within the same request thread.

To improve performance—especially under load—I’ve enabled the asynchronous history executor. This change should allow the main thread to offload history persistence by creating lightweight history jobs, instead of writing directly to the history tables, thereby reducing latency.

I’ve applied the following configuration:

yaml
flowable:
   async-history-executor-activate: true
   process:
     async-history:
       enable: true

So far, I can confirm that the async history executor is active and polling the job table as expected. However, when I execute a process definition, it does not appear to insert any history job records into the job table. As a result, the historical data is still written synchronously.

I’ll continue to investigate this behavior—it may require additional configuration or changes in how the engine is initialized. If anyone has encountered this before or has insights, feel free to share.

2

Hey @dhatric,

We removed the async history support in Flowable 7. See Flowable Open Source 7.0.0 Release for details about it.

This means that even if you enable the async history executor (that can be used for other things) the history will be stored in the same transaction synchronously.

Do you have some metrics perhaps that are showing that using the async history is better then using sync history?

Cheers,

Filip