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Reader Feedback and Insights: Status Messages May Degrade Performance
Hey, Ted:
Great advice in your article,
"Keeping Users Informed," regarding
the use of status messages to 'update' users about the state of a
process. There is one minor 'gotcha' when using this approach.
Status messages invoke workstation I/O. In this case, more
'O' than 'I,' but nonetheless, there is device file interaction.
This can significantly influence an interactive process when
running from a remotely attached device.
Under the 'been there, done that' category, we were burned when
we deployed an application using the identical method you described.
Problem was, all our tests were done using locally attached or
LAN-attached devices. Hence, we didn't visualize any problems.
When we deployed the program into production, we were inundated
with user complaints regarding the increase in the processes
execution time. It went from roughly two minutes to 50 minutes!
By way of the Start Copy Screen (STRCPYSCN) command, we were
able to trace the problem's root to the status message being
sent to the device session.
-- Michael Rooney
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