[Kevin Savage]

Hi,

I’ve been doing some performance testing of the RE API. We’ve always suspected that we had performance issues with this but I now have some strange results.


The below table summarises the basic results for adding fresh constituents through the RE API (sorry, I can't get to formatting correct):

No of constituents added Amount of time taken Average time per record
1 1.8 seconds 1.8 seconds
10 2.4 seconds 0.2 seconds
100 47.5 seconds 0.4 seconds
200 181 seconds 0.9 seconds
300 403 seconds 1.3 seconds
I stopped the following before it finished
1000 More than 50mins More than 3 seconds

Does anyone else see similar results? Have I done something wrong.

Kevin

[digitalslacker]

All the performance issues I have run into with the mainly the BBNC API have been mistakes on my part.
Once i have fixed them things seem to run pretty fast and the timeout errors typically go away.

what gets me sometimes is not closing down my objects properly in the finally
this includes doing a obj.CloseDown() but also a
System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(obj)

also make sure you are initing the REAPI outside your loop
that's gotten me a bunch of times


If you want to spit some of your code up here i'll have a look
i'm more familiar with the bbnc api
David Zeidman might have some insight if this pertains to RE


hope that helps a bit

[DavidZ]

I have never noticed the kind of performance issues that Kevin is describing and I have written applications that process tens of thousands of constituents and hundreds of thousands of gifts (well one application that did). It is possible that the hardware configuration makes a difference. Up to a smaller number of records any client can cope but for larger numbers less powerful clients cannot cope with the amount of memory required. This is especially true if you have any kind of memory leak. Over a small number of records this is not noticeable but over larger amounts even the smallest memory leak builds up into a large problem.

David

[JeffMon]

Hi Kevin,

Have you tried using IBBTobObject2's SaveAndCloseDown() method? This method is optimized for (OK, you probably guessed this) saving and closing down a record. It skips a lot of steps in the normal Save() routine that would only be necessary if you are saving an object and then continuing to use it. Try plugging it into your performance test and let us know what the results are. Here's a demo of how it's used:

Public Sub TestSaveAndCloseDown()
Dim oC As CRecord
Set oC = New CRecord
oC.Init REApplication.SessionContext
oC.Fields(RECORDS_fld_LAST_NAME) = "TestSaveAndCloseDown"

Dim oTO2 As IBBTopObject2
Set oTO2 = oC
oTO2.SaveAndCloseDown
Set oTO2 = Nothing
Set oC = Nothing
End Sub

If you can share your code, we might be able to make other suggestions as well.

Jeff