SAP PI for synchronous UI requests

[Former Member]

Hello experts,

earlier today I found this article:

http://www.itworld.com/soa/109637/architectural-principles-usage-sap-pi-a-soa-environment

and I was wondering if there was an official SAP statement regarding this:

 SAP PI usage is not recommended for synchronous communication since it places a significant load on the infrastructure services for servicing a synchronous request. Also, SAP PI cannot guarantee the QoS and response time in processing a sync request.
- For User Interface scenarios (such as a WebDynpro UI), the UI can directly consume enterprise services. SAP PI should not be used in UI driven scenarios if the backend is exposed as enterprise services.

can somebody point me to some document on this?

Thanks in advance!

[Shabarish_Nair · Accepted solution]

Tricky!

We are using PI 7.11, and when it comes to synchronous calls there are a majority of our interfaces giving us excellent response times and performance. The AAE designs helps better the cause. Most of our UI based solutions, ex. CRM screens call sync interfaces through PI.

But if a decision has to be made to route the calls not via PI, then the driving factors could be;

1. What if PI has a scheduled down time and the UI cannot afford this?

2. The UI portal could be a BCM based solution i.e it still needs to provide results even though PI could be down.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for you help!

do you send requests to backend ERP via RFC adapter?

My primary concern is performance, a possible scenario for us would be at least 100 of concurrent users with synchronous requests at the same time.

[Shabarish_Nair · Accepted solution]

Most of the scenarios are modeled using ABAP proxies but we do have a couple of scenarios with RFC adapter.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Stefan,

We are in the same boat as Shabz on this. We have a very huge portal completely relying on PI for all synchronous communication with the back end (ECC and several other legacy systems as well) and are pretty much happy with the response time and the problem we have currently is any outage in PI (even a very short duration) is causing the whole portal to be unavailable. This has proven costly in some situations.

We are still trying to get the system stabilised.

Regards

Jai