Making Programs Faster

Turnaround

The primary problem was the sudden burst of requests all at once
3000 instances of the program would run in a few minutes
These 3000 instances all competed for the CPU and the database
The programmers tried to improve turnaround time this way:

        FORK: {
           if ( $pid = fork ) {
              # exit parent
              CORE::exit;
              }
           elsif ( defined $pid ) {
              close(STDIN);
              close(STDOUT);
              close(STDERR);
              open(STDOUT,">>/programs/cassens/DC/CO/eHub/FordXML.stdout");
              open(STDERR,">>/programs/cassens/DC/CO/eHub/FordXML.stderr");
              }

This allows the server to respond to the client immediately
- The child process goes on to talk to the database
This made the problem worse, not better
- 6000 processes instead of 3000