Does Firefighter usage affects performance?

[Former Member]

Dear Experts,

can you advise if Firefighter usage affects the performance? We have Firefighter 5.2 and it is now used by our consultants in productive environment. They are complaining something that would usually require an hour to be performed (without FF session), now takes more than 8 hours (performed with Firefighter).

LSMW projects are also running slowly through FF ID.

Please help me to find out if this is just a coincidence or it is because of Firefighter.

Best Regards,

Iliya

[Former Member]

Hi lliya,

I have never seen this. FF is using the same RFC session to run transaction as you normally would. Usage of FF does not affect performance. You need to be carefull about the amount of data FF generates during the background job. Sometime, FF logs can affect performance of SAP system.

Regards,

Alpesh

[Former Member]

Thanx Alpesh,

our /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK job is scheduled to run every hour. I guess depending on when FF ID is used it takes more time for the background job to complete. It may vary from a minute to two hours. Because the job starts every hour they are overlapping and I guess this causes additional performance issues. In this case, do you think it is a wise decision to schedule the job to run every six hours instead?

We are not reviewing those logs all day long... so I guess that is feasible, but will it help?

Thanx again!

Iliya

[Former Member]

lliya,

The best practice is to run the job every hour or couple of hours. Do you think you are using FF very heavily? FF should be used only for emeregency, support and critical activities. FF generates lots of data for logs and which can affect the performance of SAP system. Do not use FF to load lots of data and run batch jobs. Make sure not to overlap the background jobs.

Try running the background jobs every 4 hours and check if you see any difference.

Regards,

Alpesh

[Former Member]

Thanx Alpesh, I`ll reschedule the job.

I know what is the best pracitce, but what is the rationale behind it? I mean the purpose of this job is to generate the log. The log is needed only for review. We are not reviewing the log every hour, we do this every week. Is there any other reason behind this?

I`ll tell you why we use Firefighter a lot. We are operating in a landscape with lots of modules, one of our R/3 productive environments (we have different releases) has more than 15 000 end-users, we have 250 support users. Due to different reasons it is common for the consultants to access change/process transactions in order to troubleshoot issues. Where it is possible they are using their regular IDs for simulating a problem, but as you know some transactions can`t be restricted in such detail, so if a support user needs to simulate something in such transaction it has to go through FF, because this is potential risk of changing of data in the system.

Also, have you heard of an effective implementation of Firefighter for non-R/3 modules.(APO, BW, CRM, SRM). I`m with the impression that it can be only effective for R/3 systems where change documents are generated, for different establishmnts (BW - infocubes) FF isnt relevant at all.

Have a nice evening!

Iliya

[Former Member]

lliya,

The rationale behind running Backgorund job every hour or two is simple: if you use FF a lot, it will have lots of data when it runs the job every 4 or 8 hours. That can serverly affect performance. You can run BG job every 12 hours when no-one is using SAP system and it might work.

As of now, you can use FF only for ABAP based system and yes, it can only record change documents.

Regards,

Alpesh

[Former Member]

In my previous company when we installed Firefighter in 2004 we had significant performance issues around the hourly background job. We solved this problem by indexing the CDHDR table and this seemed to significantly increase the job time and had less of an impact on the system. I believe there are SAP Notes as well around the performance of /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK on the SAP Marketplace as well.

Regards

Nathan

[Former Member]

I found that it is important to pay attention to the default START TIME / READ TIME fields in the program /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK. The default period is 1:02:00, that means it reads from the STAD file only for an hour back from when it is started. So if you decide to schedule the background job /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK to run more rarely - run the program /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK with variant as to capture this interval.

The other thing is that the forced run of /VIRSA/ZVFATBAK from the application "Update FF Log" Button on the log report screen is not working properly. It finishes in 1 second and it is not extracting the log. In its log report says - No statistical record for any server found with given criteria although it captures the interval in which the program reads from the STAD file.

I noticed that the priority of this manual enforced job is C, while when I schedule the job with sm36 I put A. I don`t know if that matters.

Regards,

Iliya

[Former Member]

Hi Iliya,

Please read the SAP Notes [1142312|https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1142312] and [1126253|https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1126253] to your problems.

I hope they are of help.

Cheers, Feri