There  exists an  IBM internal  use  only program  on VNET  which speeds  up
DMSFREx calls. It  is of course not  available to BITNET/EARN people  and if I
knew how it worked, I would not be  allowed to explain it :-) I have been able
to play a little with it though, and it  seems to be able to speed up execs by
-10% to 20% of  execution time. Yes, -10%, in some cases  it makes the program
run  SLOWER than  with the  standard  DMSFRE. The  reason is  obvious: if  the
program is  only issuing requests  that can be  served by the  standard DMSFRE
only, it has to  transfer control to DMSFRE and all that you  get is the extra
overhead involved with the tests performed by the accelerator.
 
  Anyway I was impressed by the improvement  and decided to write my own -- an
EARN/BITNET internal  use only  one :-)  I don't  have the  source of  the IBM
program and  have no idea  of how  it works, but  I probably used  a different
algorithm  since the  performance savings  are usually  different for  a given
exec. My  tests showed  it to  be generally faster  than the  IBM one,  but in
several cases  it was  the opposite,  especially for  long execution  times. I
would like  to provide  it as an  optional facility with  the next  release of
LISTSERV, ie YOU decide whether you run it  or not. I have strictly no idea of
how much CPU it may save you on a 'live' situation, and I cannot swear that it
will not end  up in an addressing  exception after working fine  for 2-3 hours
(it's active on my virtual machine as I type these lines though :-) ). I would
therefore be very  interested to find volunteers  for beta-testing, especially
as I don't  have time to test  it extensively myself. The thing  is one little
MODULE called KK  (temp work name), which must be  invoked ONCE (without being
NUCXLOADed or  anything like that  -- just type  'KK') and will  remain active
until the  next IPL  CMS. You  cannot terminate  it without  re-IPLing, mainly
because I'm too lazy  to write the corresponding code :-)  That's all you have
to know to test it. Please send requests to --> ERIC@FRECP11 <-- only.
 
  Eric