Performance Questions and a little need for some education.

[John Stires]

I have always been under the understanding that, in general, you use TEMP ITEMs in QTP rather than DEFINEs.  The client where I am currently working needs some convincing and is willing for me to run a bench test.   They use QTP heavily for doing simple, straight forward extracts to create CSV files.  I have strongly suggested that QUIZ would be a much better tool or, at least use TEMPs instead of DEFINEs.

I took one of their production extract QTP programs with loads of DEFINES and converted them all to TEMP ITEMs.  This is the only difference.  The original does not have as many cascading DEFINEs as most of their programs so this is an even better test in comparing the performance of DEFINES vs. TEMPs and then vs. QUIZ to create the same output file.

I ran my test programs numerous times manually on the development machine and got execution times pretty much as I expected.

Records Processed          DEFINEs               TEMPs                  QUIZ
123,800                                 0:0:54                    0:00:53                  0:00:45

Then I put them into a COM file and ran them with a SHOW TIME before and after the programs.

Records Processed          DEFINEs               TEMPs                  QUIZ
123,800                                 0:0:53                    0:00:53                  0:00:45

Then I took these three COM files to their production machine and got totally unexpected results:

Records Processed          DEFINEs               TEMPs                  QUIZ
158,802                                 0:00:53                  0:01:01                  0:00:57

The development machine is an ALPHA running OpenVMS V8.3 with PowerHouse version 8.40.D running against RMS files..
The production machine is a Titanium running the same version of VMS and PowerHouse.

Can someone explain to me how DEFINES can actually run faster the TEMPs and even a comparable QUIZ program?  This kind of shakes my long standing belief system in how QTP works.

Thanks,
John Stires

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