Of Mice and Men

Slightly off topic, but this might be of interest to older Gen developers. The Gen toolset is very 'mouse intensive' and much work needs to be done with the mouse rather than the keyboard. After 20 years of this, some of us older Gen developers are starting to feel the strain (literally), with RSI type irritations.

I found that changing to a different type of mouse was very helpful, and after trying a few out, now use a Vertical Mouse (see http://www.evoluent.com/). You may prefer a different style of mouse, and perhaps the main benefit is to change to something different?

Multi Row Fetch Experiences (3)

In previous postings I have described how we have converted all of our READ EACH statements to use multi-row fetch. Also discussed were the results of a test that showed a significant performance improvement for a simple example which only had a single READ EACH statement. These improvements were extreme because a normal application will perform a lot more processing than simply the SQL for the READ statement.

On a real world example for a complex impact analysis, we have found an 18% reduction in elapsed time, which is a significant and worthwhile improvement given the low cost of implementing the changes to the model, especially since we have automated the setting of the multi-row fetch property using VerifIEr.

Parallel Generation Results

We have now implemented the new CSE server. This has two 4-core processors and we recently conducted a simple test to benchmark the improvements gained when running CSE generation tasks in parallel (See previous post for introduction).

The results were that we obtained was a 60% reduction in elapsed time when running 4 threads in parallel and 70% reduction for 8 threads.

This was obtained with no other processes running, so for normal use, we plan to restrict a single generate task to a maximum of 4 parallel generation threads because of other tasks and on-line server processing requirements.