Another piece of information.

MPEX uses something similar to re-index its help files.  It keys on the 
creation date of some file in 'PUB.SYS' (I think its 'CICAT') and if its 
date is newer than the date of its help index files it launches a process 
to re-create the index.  Some years back I received an HP3000/928 from 
another site and noticed that every time I'd issue an MPEX help command I 
would get a series of messages and 'hash' marks indicating the progress of 
the re-indexing of the help files for all the Vesoft products.

It turned out that someone had changed the dates on most of the files in 
the SYS account to sometime in the year 2020+.

Regards
Paul Christidis


HP-3000 Systems Discussion <[log in to unmask]> wrote on 12/11/2006 
05:43:57 PM:

> At 01:13 PM 2006-12-11, Paul Mimura wrote:
> 
> >Thanks Stan for the diligent follow-up.
> >
> >I should have posted that Paul Tafel's suggestion worked out.
> >
> >The suggestion was to restore the VeSoft account without the olddate
> >parm.
> >
> >Now I can't say that I really know why it worked, but it did work!
> 
> 
> Well, as you've confirmed that it worked, now I can tell you why:
> 
> MPEX 'compiles' its internal command files (in its CMD22 and
> EXP22 groups) into more efficient versions before executing them
> the first time.
> 
> This compilation is re-triggered whenever MPEX determines that a
> command file's creation date & time is later than the creation date
> and time of the compiled version.  I imagine that you somehow
> originally restored the files in the VESOFT account when your system
> clock was incorrectly set to some future date.  After correcting your
> system clock, every time that MPEX checks, it thinks that each and
> every command file needs to be re-compiled, every time you issue any
> command.
> 
> This will slow things down very noticeably.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Paul Taffel
> 
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