We have been seeing some performance degradation over time as the activiti engine is used. What we have found helps is clearing out the history tables.
What is the recommended approach to maintain activiti performance as the engine is used over time. We use activiti workflows very heavily and in a given day can have several thousand workflows kick off.
History tables are used only to store the historic data. After some time I would say that you can archive historic data because their can slow down activiti runtime DB operations.