Re: What are the benefits of ILE?

[James David Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Bruce Jin wrote:

> >But with a subprocedure you gain speed, ease of use, and are able to group
> >your procedures into "libraries" or service programs.
>
> But I would question ‘gaining speed’. Assuming subprocedure is 10 times
> faster than a dynamic program CALL then a 10-nanosecond  program call
> becomes 1 nanosecond in subprocedure call. This change is not noticeable in
> interactive applications and in most batch applications where the same
> program is call for, say, only a few thousand times. Besides, if we exclude
> the time spent on resolving calling procedure/program, the execution time
> may be the same for both. This means that a 10-second run program will only
> become a 9.99-sencond run procedure.

I can tell you that speed difference is enormous.  At our shop we had a
batch program that needed to finish within about 2 hours.  It did a lot of
date manipulation.  We wrote a called program to handle the date stuff.
The program's run time increased to around 6 hours!  Your example above
only considers one call - this program called our "convenience program"
many, many times.  The slow down was unacceptable.  At the time we didn't
have any ILE sub-procedures in place so we ended up removing the calls and
copying all the code back in.  Yuck.

Of course now we use ILE so everything is easier (with eval var=func(parm)
being the biggest benefit in my mind).

James Rich
james@eaerich.com

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