Here at Sprezz Towers excitement is rising about a forthcoming update to S/List that we think our users are going to love. With each release of OI we kept getting reports that S/List was getting slower - and our testing confirmed that this was the case.

So we did what we do best at Sprezz - attacked the problem head on with a radical rewrite of the S/List engine. So for the past year or so we've been working on a new version of SLIST_PRODUCE (the program that does the grunt work for actually creating the report) to eliminate all calls to GET and SET_PRINTER. A few thousand of lines of code later we are finally ready to go public with the results. Now the User Interface remains the same (for now ;)) but the print engine is significantly faster. Those of you with long memories may remember AREV LightSpeed? Well we wouldn't go quite so far as to call it that but we have managed to wring every drop of performance from the product. Your mileage may vary but we reckon that most reports will run several times faster. Take a look at the following figures to see what we mean!

call slist("LIST 1000 SYSREPOS APPID TYPEID CLASSID ENTITYID LANDSCAPE ID-SUPP NOT-CENTRE")
VSPRINTER2	VSPRINTER1	S/LIST EXPRESS
77.956 78.97 79.17	56.368 56.797 56.717	4.349 4.526 4.543
Average 78.699	Average 56.627	Average 4.473
call slist("LIST SYSREPOS")
VSPRINTER2	VSPRINTER1	S/LIST EXPRESS
1099.197 1096.097 1121.036	780.128 776.609 774.843	46.699 46.065 45.938
Average 1,105.443	Average 777.193	Average 46.234
For fairness we repeated the exercise with OList (Oinsight's reporting tool) and got the following results :- call list("LIST 1000 SYSREPOS APPID TYPEID CLASSID ENTITYID LANDSCAPE ID-SUPP") VSPRINTER2 VSPRINTER1 18.491 18.076 17.789 7.945 8.259 9.21 Average 18.119 Average 8.805 call olist("LIST SYSREPOS") VSPRINTER2 VSPRINTER1 169.793 169.400 170.111 90.061 89.313 89.199 Average 169.768 Average 89.520

And the end result :-



If you'd like to see the new reporting engine in action and you're not on our beta program then contact Martyn at martyn at sprezzatura dot com for a WebEx session demo. If you want we'll sign an NDA then show you it working against your own data. We're sure you'll be impressed. And it goes without saying that if there are aspects of YOUR system that you'd like to see run faster we're always happy to provide consultancy!

The Technical Bits
For those of you who like to know how we do these things...

Firstly there was no magic bullet - as stated earlier this required thousands of lines of code. We started by looking at the subset of OIPI functionality that S/LIST actually uses and we downloaded the VSVIEW manual and obtained a licensed copy for our own use so we could legally use the VSVIEW OLE interface.We then removed all SET_PRINTER and GET_PRINTER calls and replaced them with direct calls to the OLE control. To squeeze out every last drop of performance we didn't create an external callable routine for this. When running a report, GET_ and SET_ printer can be called hundreds of thousands of times and we wanted to eliminate this overhead. Fianlly we removed features that OIPI adds automatically such as CSV production as S/LIST already handles this internally.