e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Batch performance issues

The OpenVMS batch subsystem is designed for running jobs at scheduled times in the background. What it's not designed for is running 60,000 jobs that last on average 10 seconds each. The overhead of process creation and deletion in this situation was severely impacting perfomance at a client site. The solution: application redesign.

Ultimately, the application will become an event driven loop that processes outstanding input files. For now, we have redone the command procedure that was being submitted 60,000 times to submit once and poll the directory for input files, and run the application for each of them. This gave us an immediate win. Redoing the app so that the overhead of opening and closing all the data files should improve things even more...