Performance Questions and a little need for some education.

[John Stires]

It is called baby steps.  Get them to see the benefit of looking forward out of the box they have been programming in for however many years.  Then, hopefully, I can get them to be more accepting of the bigger improvements.  They will listen the small things first.  As they see some benefit, hopefully, I can get them to move forward on things that will make a bigger difference.  

Until then, I am a contractor and it is their system.  Their view is that someday, I will walk away and they will have to maintain my code.  They are deathly afraid of folks coming in and creating code they cannot maintain.  They have been burned before, I can understand where they are coming from on that issue.  So I need to take it easy with them and maintain their comfort level through these baby steps.

I cannot think of any system I have ever worked on that should have a process that should take this long under any circumstances.  Given free rein, yes, those 4 issues would be my first targets.  


I think most of us have been situations similar to the one I am in now.

Thanks much for the support.

John


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Deskin [mailto:Bob.Deskin at ca.ibm.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 1:38 PM
To: John Stires
Cc: powerh-l at lists.sowder.com; powerh-l-bounces+bob.deskin=ca.ibm.com at lists.sowder.com
Subject: Re: Performance Questions and a little need for some education.

Sounds like you need to look at the "big" picture - specifically #4 in 
your list. If you're continually reading the same data from the data files 
and sorting it, that's a lot of redundancy. I/O is usually the biggest 
time eater with PowerHouse. I suggest minimizing that first and then look 
at CPU usage.

Bob



From:
John Stires <jstires at EBDS.com>
To:
"powerh-l at lists.sowder.com" <powerh-l at lists.sowder.com>
Date:
2009-08-18 01:14 PM
Subject:
Performance Questions and a little need for some education.
Sent by:
powerh-l-bounces+bob.deskin=ca.ibm.com at lists.sowder.com



Normally, I would be at the same conclusion you all offer.  Squeezing out 
he last bit of time and resources can be a huge waste.
 
That is precisely the problem here.  Their nightly jobs run 12 to 14 hours 
and are starting run into the users coming in  the morning to work.  It 
can be an unpleasant picture.  There are so many QTP programs involved. 
One just one such job, I counted well over 65 QTP programs, most of which 
1,000, to 3,500 or more lines of code.  It is not so much the number of 
lines of code, but the inefficiencies involved.   They, nearly, all have 
very similar issues:
 
1)      Generally, deeply cascading DEFINEs
2)      Linking as many as 20 files together in one pass and then sorting 
(Boo Hiss!) Oh yes, including several outputs and subfiles all in the same 
request.
3)      Sorting in general in QTP
4)      Hitting the same file several times for the same data instead of 
gathering the data once, putting into a subfile for later use.
 
There are other issues as well, but these are the main ones.  When you are 
bumping up against time constraints like this, you do what you have to do 
and seek out all of the possible ways to shave time and resources.  There 
are a lots of techniques they have used for a long time and therefore must 
be  “good and sound”.  I am trying desperately to move their thinking into 
ways that they will be receptive to in making these processes more 
manageable, both from the maintenance and execution time stand point.
 
All of which is say, marginal gains are, indeed successes.
 
Thanks,
John-- 
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