5.5: Channels performance improvement

Containers are named blocks of data that are designed for passing information between programs. Programs can pass any number of containers between each other. Containers are grouped in sets that are called channels. A channel is analogous to a parameter list. CICS® TS 5.5 introduces a performance improvement that benefits applications where many containers are stored in a single channel.

CICS TS 5.5 improves performance by using a hash table to access containers, rather than searching a list. The performance improvement changes the order in which containers are returned. Therefore, applications should not rely on the order in which containers are returned. The CICS feature toggle com.ibm.cics.container.hash can be set to restore CICS to the previous behavior. For more information see Upgrading applications.

This section presents a performance comparison of the two containers implementation options.

For more information about developing CICS applications by using channels, see Transferring data between programs using channels.