Re: RPG Performance question

Hi, David:

In part, this will depend on how your "legacy" applications and their menus were designed. If all originally OPM (*DFTACTGRP), then it is likely that you may have had the menus coded to issue RCLRSC upon return from lower levels. This would in effect close all files opened at that call level and below. You might want to reconsider that logic.

Also, some ILE applications are coded so that all top-level programs (called directly from menus) use ACTGRP(*NEW), so upon return, all of the resources within that new activation group are automatically reclaimed. (This may or may not turn out to be a "good idea", depending on how your end-users actually use the applications; if they constantly come back to the main menu, this could turn out to be a really "bad idea"...)

If a file is already open, then the path-length is somewhat shorter for subsequent programs or modules opening the same files, but there is still some overhead. At the machine level, an OPEN costs around one-million instructions (more or less). So, if your application is opening many, many files, then closing them, and opening them again, this overhead will add up.

It really also depends on how the applications are used. How often do the users return all the way back out to the main menu, and then go down a different path? Or, does the application provide a way to jump directly from one part of the application to another (e.g. such as group jobs)?

All the best,

Mark S. Waterbury

> David FOXWELL wrote:

Hi all,

I often notice a significant time lapse when exiting client management applications and returning to a menu. Noticing the difference in the list of files (with wrkjob) that I can see that are open during running of the main rpg code and the empty list on returning to the menu, I was wondering if all the closing of files was at least partially to blame. Files can appear on the list of files open several times. This is because they are declared in several modules bound (by copy) to the same program.Is this something to be avoided, or is the performance cost negligible?

Thanks