QTP as a system hog

[J V. STIRES]

Dave,

Sorry.  I tried sending this yesterday immediately after receiving
your request.  Unfortunately, This is my first response to one of
these request and my reply went to the wrong address.

I am not one to offer much advice, especially on an HP.  The extent of
my knowledge of HP is that I can spell it.  PowerHouse on VMS is
another matter.

First question I have for you is why are you using QTP to build a
subfile???  Yes QTP will do the job, but it is very expensive in terms
of resources to perform such "trivial tasks".  QUIZ perform the same
tasks with a fraction of the overhead.

In the PowerHouse manuals and in the training materials you receive
when taking PowerHouse courses, you can find it very strongly
suggested to NOT use the SORT command in QTP.  The difference in using
the SORT command in QTP and QUIZ is very significant.

QTP builds the full record complex and submits the whole record
complex the sort.  This record complex includes all files listed in
the ACCESS statement as weel as the OUTPUT and SUBFILE statements. 
This can lead to a pretty sizable chunk of data for each sort record. 


QUIZ, on the other hand, takes from a comparable record complex only
what it needs for the sort keys and to create output record; nothing
more.  Hence, you have a much smaller record complex to sort.

Last week I had 2 QTP programs that had a run time of about 2 hours
each.  They get run several times a week.  We were under a very tight
time crunch.  It took me about 1/2 hour to make the following changes
in both programs:

1)	Removed a link to a file that was not needed.  Your process
does not have this problem.

2)	Added a CHOOSE command to used the keys to get at the needed
records instead of depending on the SELECT.  The file I was dealing
with has several million records.  I passed the CHOOSE values into QTP
via system symbols, thus eliminating the need to write a COM file with
the values included and then running the COM file.  Your file may not
have such a key for the dates which eliminates this a possible help in
your case.

3)	The first REQUEST built 4 subfiles, all indexed.  Two of the
subfiles, because if the conditional IF statement on the file, could
never contain any records, but an empty subfile was built every time.

4)	I removed the indexes on the remaining subfiles.  They were
never used.

5)	Changed the DEFINES to ITEM statements and simplified them as
much as possible.

The running time for these 2 program dropped from 2 hours as I said
before to 50 seconds for one and 33 seconds for the other.  We checked
and rechecked the results updates quite a number of time to be sure
that the updates went in correctly!

Forgive me and my soap box dissertation, but QTP is a valuable tool,
but it is very much over used.  It is amazing just how much you can
accomplish using leaner and meaner QUIZ to extract data and recombine
the data into the groupings and forms that you really need.

Hope this helps.

John
jvstires@hq.gylrd.com
======================================================================
Dave,
We are on HP3000 PH819.C3.  We have had this problem back to PH6.09. 
We started having 
this problem when MPE did their ques differently (don't know the
version maybe around 3.0)  When a QTP process is hogging all the 
machine resources is when there is a locking issue where more than one
user is trying
to get access to a file that is locked with QTP.  Even using SET LOCK
FILE REQUEST doesn't
help when users are trying to access the same file.  What we've found
is that when MPE
experiences a locking issue like this, where a user is locked out of a
file, it keeps bumping
up the number of resources for the user or process that has the file
locked in an attempt
to get the other user access sooner.  It keeps throughing resources at
the offender until
they have the entire machine resources.  No one else can do anything,
even a simple
MPE command until the process is done and the lock released.  Luckily
this doesn't
happen that often and when it does, the offending process finishes in
about 10 minutes
when it has all the machine resources going towards getting it done.

Making sure that SET LOCK FILE REQUEST on every QTP helps it from
happening as
much.  Also on systems with a lot of users, we try to limit the QTP
processes to the
evening when only a few users are on at a time.  When it does happen,
everyone
takes a break or starts catching up on email or something for a few
minutes, 
until the process finishes.  Also doing long extracts and sorting with
Quiz instead
of QTP helps.  I like writing QTP code better than Quiz when it comes
to creating
subiles and doing totals, etc.  But QTP causes problems because of the
locking
issues that is does that Quiz doesn't do.

Georgia Miller
Great Falls Public Schools
Great Falls, Montana
____________________________________________________________________

>To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu; HP3000-L@RAVEN.UTC.EDU
>From: Dave Knispel on Tue, Apr 18, 2000 11:27 AM
>Subject: QTP as a system hog

>
>To all,
>
>I'm working on an HP3000 using QTP version 8.19.C2.  I have a QTP
process
>that is reading a NM/KSAM file, doing a select, sorting, then writing
out
>two subfiles.  This process keeps taking over my system.  Even
running in
>the EQ it will take all available system resources so no one (even
the folks
>in a higher queue) can get any CPU time.
>
>Has anyone seen this before?  Any help would be appreciated.
>
>I'm posting this to both the HP3000-L and the Powerhouse-L.
>
>David Knispel
>dave.knispel@frequencymarketing.com
>Phone: 513-248-5029
>Fax: 513-248-2672
>
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