Re: What part of an RPG program is re-used? -- RPG400-L

Sounds like a perfect job for a User Index. The only question I have is how
the data gets loaded if it is supposed to be shared? How does it get
updated?

I don't see any way that you share static data. The data is in it's own
memory and you cannot access from another job.

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Back in the olden days, one of the things that was so efficient about
the midrange was the way it used a shared, read-only section of memory
for the program code. That way, 20 people using order entry would use
only one copy of the program. The variables specific to a given job
were stored in the job itself (in the Process Access Group, if I
remember correctly).

My question is how much of that still holds today? Here's what I'm
wondering about. I'd like to create a service program that provides
data from a table. That table is static; it will not change during the
life of the job and most likely only needs to be refreshed at IPL.

I could use a database table and pin the table to memory with SETOBJACC,
but that still means I have to go through a layer of DB management each
time I want a value. Unless things have changed drastically, having an
array in my program will still be faster, especially if I have an
ordered array with a relatively small number of elements (measured in
the 100s at most) and then load that table at initialization time. Even
if the data is 1K in length, I'm talking less than 1MB of memory.
However, what I don't want is 100 user jobs to create 100 copies of that
table; now I'm talking megabytes and as the number of tables and users
grows, so does the used (duplicated) memory.

So, is there a way to have a static chunk of memory that is shared by
all the jobs that call this service program? The program code will
certainly be shared, but what about the data? If I create an array in
my D-specs, as far as I know I can't make it read only. Therefore it
has to be in the PAG (or whatever the equivalent is), and thus is
repeated per job.

The more I look at it, the more it seems that SETOBJACC is my best bet
and that I have to choose between speed and memory usage. I suppose I
can share a single user space among multiple jobs. Or a user index,
perhaps? I always wonder about those sorts of objects, though, since
every request requires a fully qualified object name. How often do
those get resolved?

Thoughts?

Joe
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