Re: job queues

In the past, I worked with a lot of code that was migrated from a S/36. In that world, they'd often use a single-threaded job queue... they'd submit many procedures so that each one would run after the other was finished.

It was more efficient than making it all one single job, becuase it would have less in memory at one time. It was also more like the punched card environments (many S/36 software was migrated from a S/3, possibly via the S/34). In this case, you could put multiple jobs in the card stack and they'd run one after the other, etc. (At least, I think so... my mind is fuzzy, it was too long ago.)

Anyway.. this type of coding is commonplace in old solutions. And one of the unfortunate things about this particular platform is that people strongly resist change -- it worked 40 years ago, why not still do it today?? Haha.

Another thing is that back then multitasking wasn't as good as it is today, and systems had far less memory, so running one task at a time was useful.

Anyway, I can't tell you whether it'll break anything in your environment. You need to analyze that and figure it out. But, the "right" way forward is to determine which jobs should be sitting on a single threaded queue to wait for each other, and which ones should run simultaneously with other jobs, get that all straightened out, and create separate queues for each situation, then change the code to use them properly.



On 7/15/2013 10:24 AM, Hoteltravelfundotcom wrote:

What do you think of a shop which has only 1 jobs que? SHouldn't there be a
test system
for a programmer? This has happened twice now. I have a long running
RPG program, working over the weekend, it didn't sink in the first time.
so then its still running and causes some jobs to not run. Consequently
subsystems
did not come up. I don't recall in many years either a system that shuts
down every night and comes back up.
It is frustrating. Am I wrong in thinking that they should have more than 1
jobq, that is, that other jobs can run at the same time that there should
be a test system? Is it possible for a newcomer to not make these mistakes?
I suppose I am to blame that it happened again. BUt I really
have trouble acclimating to this type of environment, and not sure what can
be done.