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I work with building PB9.x applicaiton with Powergen, currently it takes me about 1.5 hrs to build 113pbls on a machine that has a 2.5ghz processor and over 512mb ram. I place the pbls on a Ramdisk that I have setup to make things faster, but it still seems to take forever to build.
Does Powergen support multi processor machines? and if not are there any suggestions on how the speed can be improved?
thanks
Mike Devlin
Quality Assurance Project Lead
Prophet 21, Inc.
Mike,
The time does sound excessive. Are all the executables (EXEs, DLLs, etc.) needed for the build on a local disk (or Ramdisk)? How many objects in the 113 PBLs? Can you send your project file (*.gen) and output log (powergen.log, by default) for a recent build?
Phil
Here is the powergen file. The building of the PBD's doesn't take long at all, its the generating of all the windows. When this is building the windows section takes the longest part of time.
I do all the building on the Ramdisk and then create the Exe and PBD's on the hard disk.
Thanks for you help.
Mike,
I don't see anything unusual in the project file. Could you send an output log as well?
Is PowerBuilder installed on a local disk? Are you using a virus checker? If so can you disable it and try again?
Regards,
Phil
Sorry for taking a couple days to get back to you, things were busy around here.
PB, Powergen are on the local machine, the pbls are on the Ramdisk and the log file writes to the ram disk. We do have virus checker on it, but I don't think that will save us too much time, because I have two different versions of our application and one takes 45 minutes to build and the other 1.5 hrs to build, now I know some of this is that the newer version has more code, but that seems like a ton of time to be added. Now the build that runs in 45 minutes is PB7 and uses Powergen for PB7, could that be the issue ? Could this simply be PB9 causing the issues?
Here's the outout file.
Here's the file ...
I think it's quite possible that the PB9 version would take that much longer to build. It looks like you're doing everything possible to optimize the build time (and it is a very large application).
Any one else want to comment on this?
Phil
Phil,
I just upgraded from pb8 to pb9. I have noticd a SIGNIFICANT slowdown in the regen time. I have a medium size app with about 2400 objects. Doing a full rebuild in PB9 is about 6 minutes. In Pgen it is about 20 minutes.
The same app, in PB8, takes about 5-6 miniutes to do a full rebuild, both in PN8 and in Pgen.
Once the rebuild completes, the actual build of the exe and pbd's seems about the same as I have expoerienced in the past.
I will do some tests in PB8 anbd PB9 to benchmark this and I will get back to you with better numbers.
Regards,
Neil
Neil,
I have not seen this discrepancy, but I'll look into it. Which version of PowerGen are you using?
Regards,
Phil
Phil,
I did an organized series of builds, using the same app in PB8 and PB9. I am using PB8.0.2.9506 (GA) and PB9.0.1.6533 (GA). These tests were run a Dell P4 laptop with 1gb of memory. I rebooted the app and either PB8/9 or PGen was open, nothing else. I was disconected from the network (trying to eliminate any other work on the machine and protect it while my AV was turned off). I am using Powergen V5.5.1.1 for PB9 and V6.0.0.5 for PB8.
In PowerGen I did a Regenerate and in PB I did a full build, eliminating the app object build, which takes only a minute or so.
I use Mcafee AV, web update version. I tested with Mcafee turned on and turned off. This app has about 2400 objects.
With Mcafee turned OFF:
PB8 using PGen 15:40
PB8 using PB8 Full Rebuild 6:28
PB9 using Pgen 17:08
PB9 using PB8 Full Rebuild 9:05
With Mcafee tuned ON:
PB8 using PGen 18:01
PB8 using PB8 Full Rebuild 7:30
PB9 using Pgen 20:21
PB9 using PB8 Full Rebuild 9:55
You can see from the above that it takes Powergen over twice as long to do a full build, verses using PB's native full rebuild. The AV adds a little bit to the processing time but the results are more or less the same.
I started using PowerGen about 18 months ago, using a P3 laptop. I KNOW that when I started using PowerGen I did the same test (with AV turned on) and PowerGen was just slightly faster than PB. That was using PB8. I am not sure what version of PowerGen I was using- you may have that in your records. I do not know when the performance changed because I rarely do full rebuilds in PB.
If there is anything else I can do, let me know. I attached a log from the PB9 rebuild...
Regards,
Neil
I found something interesting on the performance issue. I've traced the problem to differences in the ORCA interface between PB7 and later versions. ORCA is the API, supplied by Sybase, for accessing PB's build and library management functions.
I took the latest build of PowerGen and built the same application with PowerGen for PB7 and then with PowerGen for PB8; I saw the big difference in speed. Then I stubbed out the ORCA calls to regenerate the objects and compare the results and they were essentially identical. So the problem is a change that was made in ORCA, not in PowerGen. (For what it's worth the PowerGen "overhead" amounts to a couple percentage points of the ORCA time.)
I have a spoken to developers at Sybase about this and will pursue a solution as a high priority. I will keep you posted.
Regards,
Phil