Decreasing Report Speed 1

[metrok]

We have a series of Impromptu reports that we run through for a number of accounts resulting in over 1500 reports being opened and saved in one run. Report speed is great at first but it continues to decrease over the course of the run. For example: in the first 15 minutes we get 200 reports, the second 15 minutes it's 136, and so on. I notice that some memory is consumed but there is plenty left (around 800-900MB) and we're also not filling the temp directory drive. Any ideas?

 

[griffindm]

metrok,

Not sure what's causing the behavior, but are you closing the report and/or catalog between runs? Is it the same report being run 1500 times, or 1500 different reports? If they are different reports, are the filters set to index columns? Are comparable numbers of rows being returned by each report? What is your database?

Some extra info will help us determine what's going on.

HTH,

Dave Griffin
The Decision Support Group
Reporting Consulting with Cognos BI Tools
"Magic with Data"

http://www.decisionsupportgroup.com

 

[metrok]

The reports are run from a loop within a macro with a new account number being selected at the start of each loop. The same 8 reports are then run for each account. Only one catalog is used. Each report is closed, but since it's only one catalog, it is left open. The filter for each report is the account number and all data is pulled from hotfiles. I'm not familiar enough with Impromptu to know if hotfiles can be indexed, but the speed of the reports is fine at the start of the run. Each report is saved in pdf and excel format. The decrease in speed is noticed whether the reports are printed or not.

 

[griffindm]

Are some of the reports in the loop updating the hotfile, or is the hotfile static? You are correct in that there is no way to index a hotfile. Are there other report sources besides the hotfile? If so what is your database. Do some of the filter accounts return many more rows than others? If so are these randomly occuring, or do the accounts at the end of your run have more results than those run earlier?

Sorry to have so many questions, but there is no obvious reason why this should happen for the same reports (with the same filter expressions only different values). When I run this type of process I often see widely different run times, but it is based on the number or rows returned by the filter.

HTH,

Dave Griffin
The Decision Support Group
Reporting Consulting with Cognos BI Tools
"Magic with Data"

http://www.decisionsupportgroup.com

 

[metrok]

The reports pull data from several hotfiles, all of which are static. Some accounts do pull more data than others but they are random during the report run, not stacked at any one position. Your previous question about the catalog got me thinking - is there a possible benefit in closing the catalog after each loop?