update stats fails

hi we are currently running hpux 9.04 with informix 7.24 ud1. until recently a table with 21 colums and around half a million rows has had it's stats updated (high) each evening. This would normally take around an hour using:- update stats high for table_name. It now never returns at all and just sits there (for the whole 24 hours until we need to update stats again) Informix tech support said that we should be only updating a few columns in the table instead of the entire table. Has anyone any ideas why the update of stats doesn't seem to work any more even though it did when the table was a couple of thousand rows smaller?? i have checked the indexes with oncheck and can find no answers... -- John Horton DBA Cognito (Informix on Linux) john.horton@cognito.co.uk sysadmin and mahjongg player use Tk;$s="";@l=(121,101,116,95,97,110,111,116,104,101,114,95,112,101,114,108,95,104,97,99,107,101,114,33);$ll=24;for($a=0;$a<$ll;$a++){$s=$s.chr($l[$a]);}$mw=tkinit;$t=$s;$a=0;$c=$mw->Canvas(-width=>155,-height=>15);$c->create('text',80,9,-text=>$t);$c->pack();$c->CanvasBind('<Motion>'=>sub{my($x,$y)=($Tk::event->x,$Tk::event->y);$x=int(rand($mw->screenheight));$y=int(rand($mw->screenwidth));$mw->geometry("+$x+$y");$a++;if($a==5){exit;}});MainLoop;

First tech support is correct you do not need to do HIGH on the whole table. Follow the recommendations in the Performance Guide or get one of the utilities that implement those protocols like my own dostats utility in the package utils2_ak. These protocols are MUCH faster. To speed the processing set the PSORT environment variables and set PDQPRIORITY to at least 2. PSORT_NPROCS should be at least 10 (more will not actually create more sort thread but will allocate more memory) and PSORT_DBTEMP should be set to at least three filesystems with enough space to hold the sort-work files. Why is it hanging? I don't know. What was the session doing at the time? How was the environment configured? What else was going on on the machine? Why do you feel it is neccessary to update stats daily? Can the relative strengths of 500,000 keys REALLY change every day? Art S. Kagel johnh wrote: > > hi > we are currently running hpux 9.04 with informix 7.24 ud1. > until recently a table with 21 colums and around half a million rows has > had it's stats updated (high) each evening. > This would normally take around an hour using:- > > update stats high for table_name. > > It now never returns at all and just sits there (for the whole 24 hours > until we need to update stats again) > > Informix tech support said that we should be only updating a few columns > in the table instead of the entire table. > > Has anyone any ideas why the update of stats doesn't seem to work any > more even though it did when the table was a couple of thousand rows > smaller?? > i have checked the indexes with oncheck and can find no answers... Art S. Kagel