SAP BI 7 - Background process performance Issue

[Former Member]

This question is about efficiency of dialog process compared to inefficiency of the background process and I want suggestions from SAP Basis/BI experts on this.

We have observed that our background processes on BI server are not running as efficiently as we would like them to run.

For example

DSO activation:

When I use Dialog mode for DSO Activation with 3 parallel processes, I can activate a certain DSO with in 15 seconds. But the same DSO and the same data package when activated using background mode with 3 parallel process takes about 15 minutes.(there are plenty of background processes available on the system when this activation is running). So dialog process runs 60 times faster than background process.

In BI 7 most of the operations can be executed only in the background parallel mode. And from the activation example we know that our background processes are not as efficient as dialog processes. It

is understood that in general the background processes will not be as efficient as dialog processes, but in our case the difference is a factor of 60. We want help to identify, why the background processes are not as efficient as dialog processes. What SAP Basis settings need to be changed to make them as efficient as we can. Any suggestion or help will be highly appreciated.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Eswaran

Generally a dialog process is not faster by any means than a background workprocess. Nevertheless i trust you on your observations, so there must be some difference. I just did a small test, i ran SE16 chose a big table and selected 10000 rows, i did 3 tries in dialog and 3 in background. The results:

dialog: 10.2s, 9.4s, 9.6s

background: 26s, 24s, 24s

So even in my simple example the background execution took more time. The issue here is, that the resulting output (which is pretty large) had to be saved additionally in a spool (a total of 167 pages) when executed in background. The selection of the data certainly did not take more time in either case.

The most important difference between dialog and batch processes is the memory management. Dialog processes work with a shared memory segment (extended memory). Background processes have their private heap memory.

Nevertheless, background processes are not "slower" in general, not at all. You will need to observe closer, what your processes are doing. Maybe watching SM50 while running the DSO activation is enough to see it, maybe you need to trace a process. If you see large spools generated, or huge amounts of memory consumed, we might already have an answer.

Regards

Michael

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

The dialog and background process will work on different memory structures obviously there will be difference in performance. Increase the memory parameters 1% of the present values and check it like that u increase on, it is a better way also.

Edited by: bhaskar1818 bhanu on May 27, 2008 3:22 PM

[sap_cohort · Accepted solution]

Any chance you can clarify which memory parameters you think should be increased?

Thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I think the parameter being referred to is abap/heap_area_nondia.

What is the current status. Do you still have more time while running things in Background?

Regards

Deep!

[Former Member]

We saw the job log in SM37 when activation was running in the background mode and log showed that

u201CProgram RSBATCH_EXECUTE_PROZESS successfully scheduled as job BIBCTL_49VQYEYSLA9SH00QBYNN3MTUV with ID XXXXXu201D was executed internally about 100 times.

If anyone wanted to see the job log; I can directly email them.

[Former Member]

Hi,

I know it is quite an old thread, but please can you let us know if your problem was resolved. If so, how ?

We are facing a similar issue with long running activation jobs and would like to hear your experience in resolving the same.

Thanks,

Ram