RevMedia

Perry Howell at the Inland Revenue recently experienced an interesting problem that may concern other users of earlier versions of AREV (1.12-). Whenever the system went into "Updating Indexes" mode, it would not respond to keyboard input for several seconds. There were no rogue records in !INDEXING, in fact the file was nearly empty.

The problem was finally traced to the fact that a very large file import had been performed and at some stage the !INDEXING file had grown to over 1MB. Unfortunately the Sizelock parameter had never decremented to 0 so the file never decreased in size even when empty. Consequently the SELECT being performed internally by the indexing operation took a long time to complete and return control to the keyboard.

Once identified the problem was resolved by copying the index transactions to a temporary file, CLEARFILEing the !INDEXING file then copying the index transactions back in.