Parallelization in CICS to reduce response time

Atul Banke · New User Joined: 08 Aug 2011 Posts: 7 Location: India

Hi,

I have a CICS webservice which is taking a higher response time for specific customers (commercial customer with high number of accounts attached - i.e. more than 2000 accounts). In order to reduce the response time, we are planning to introduce some parallelization.

The current high level design is something like below:
Front-end microservices --> DataPower --> CICS SOAP Webservice (Initial customer validation ---> Customer accounts fetch ---> retrieve balances for each of the accounts ----> Aggregate balance at Account Set level)

currently the individual account balance retrieval is being done for each account in synchronous manner.

I could think of using CICS Asynchronous APIs (RUN TRANSID, FETCH CHILD/ANY) and run in parallel the account retrieval transaction (e.g. each instance processing 100 accounts in a group). But I am not sure if CICS Asynchronous APIs can be used for running the same TRANSID in parallel 20-30 instances, and if that is the efficient way.

Could one of you please help who have exp with CICS asynchronous APIs, or if there is more efficient way of doing the parallelization in CICS?

Note: I have gone through the Redbooks on IBM CICS Asynchronous API, but it doesn't mention about running the same transaction Id for prallelism.

Pete Wilson · Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2023 2:42 pm

I've no idea from the programming side, but the way the underlying dataset containing the data is set up can affect response times. This assumes it is VSAM:

e.g.
- Is RLS enabled or not.
- What are the SHAREOPTIONS are set to.
- CICS buffer pool that the dataset uses, and therefore the CISIZE.

Atul Banke · New User Joined: 08 Aug 2011 Posts: 7 Location: India

Hi Pete,

Thanks for your reply. The data is primarily on DB2 for z/OS and the Db2 queries were already reviewed/optimized

Rohit Umarjikar · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2023 12:31 pm

Why all these detours and instead write a stored procedures ?

pepeo_2k3 · New User Joined: 04 Nov 2023 Posts: 6 Location: Azerbayjan

Hi;
Yes you can. you have to consider a correlation pattern between each step. Each step is a separate stub code that is called with XCTL from the previous step. The final step aggregates the responses and makes the soap reply.