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    p_file_20 taking a long time to run

    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 20

    Description:
    We run p-file-20 nightly (M-F) and I noticed lately that it's taking a long time to run. In v19, it took about 2 hours to run but in v20 it's taking 3 hours and now sometimes 4-5 hours.

    Up until 9/22 it started at 10:12pm and finished around 1:00am. Then starting on 9/23 it didn't finish until almost 2:00am and on 9/26 didn't finish until almost 3:00am.

    It's been processing approximately the same number of records so I don't know what would cause it to all of a sudden take an additional hour or two to run.

    We have ruled out missing Oracle indexes (KB 8192-6423) and the presence of Oracle Statistics (KB's 16384-29537 and 16384-31313) as causes of slowness. Per KB 16384-21105, we have begun restarting Aleph weekly, but that has not helped.

    We changed to TWO-TASK, with a separate database server, and think this might be involved.

    A test run of p-file-20 with update database 'N' took only 1 hour to run.

    Resolution:
    [KB's 16384-29362 and 16384-29378 describe some TWO-TASK issues, but the change to TWO-TASK was only indirectly relevant in this case.]

    The result of your test run with Update Database = "N" shows that the time is being taken in writing records. (Updates are written for *all* input records, even if they are the same as the existing record. Producing an input file including only changed records can reduce the time considerably.)

    The problem was with the database server. Switching to a different server improved the response time of p_file_20 (and other functions writing to Oracle). KB 16384-41841 is slow item display at this same site, with the same cause.


    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013