RE: Activation Group Issues ? -- RPG400-L

Thanks.  You hit the nail on the had, as I mentioned to Carel.  Turns
out I was opening and closing the file every time.

Yeah, sorry... I read your message to Carel only after I had alreadyreplied.

only suspected activation groups because they are the bit I understand
least, and which as I mentioned, my reading to date has left me a bit
confused, but I will dig in and try some more.  Hence the question mark
in the subject line.  Perhaps a more overt subject line would have been
"could this possibly be an activation group issue?"

Actually, as luck would have it I'm writing an article about activationgroups as we speak.

I understood that you weren't sure if it was an activation group issue ornot, but in the body of your message you were talking about giving upservice programs, and you didn't seem to be considering any otherpossibilities.

I guess I was wondering how you jumped to the conclusion that the actgrpwas the problem in the first place, it didn't make sense to me to evensuspect it. Sorry if I pushed that a little too far.

The subproc just does a chain using the imput parms to fetch a value,
and if it doesn't find it in file1, it goes to another file to fetch the
default value.  The info is just appended demographic type info for our
customer file, like employee size or whether it's a female owned
business, or whether they can accept HTML emails, or whether they allow
us to rent their address to business partners, etc.  It's a vertical
file appended to the customer file in our third party order/entry
package, so we can add new "fields" by making up a new code to identify
the new information.

That's probably a big part of the performance problem, as well. Now youhave to do a non-sequential database look up for every single field ofevery single customer. Vertical files may be flexible, but they're awfulfor performance.

In this case, I really doubt that passing a DS would help much if youstill have to do 6 different CHAIN operations. The disk operations will beyour biggest bottleneck.

( If you change the file to be, uhh, less vertical, then passing a datastructure might help performance at the expense of flexibility. )

Is the file small enough that you could load all of the fields into anarray or even a dynamic memory allocation, and perform your lookups inthat? I suspect that this would improve performance without you needingto change the service program's interface.