There are different means you can use to try to decrease LOAD time. Listed below are a few guidelines that may help you reduce LOAD time: o Loading an SCA library for a software system is a time consuming operation and should be done in batch. Loading more than one module at a time is more efficient than loading modules separately. Using LOAD *.ANA is a common method for loading multiple modules. You use LOAD/DELETE to clean up .ANA files after they are loaded successfully and to use a little less disk space during the load. o With large software systems, it is a good idea to use more than one SCA library and load them all simultaneously. This can lessen the elapsed LOAD time considerbly. You should be able to load several libraries simultaneously on a single disk. Additionally, using more than one CPU to do your loads also helps, but SCA loading is mainly I/O intensive. For more information about how to use multiple libraries, see the help subtopics under Libraries. o Once your SCA library starts getting above 20K blocks, you should consider preallocating the library when you create it. SCA currently extends the library file by 1000 blocks at a time, so for large libraries it frequently extends the library. You can preallocate an SCA library by specifying CREATE LIBRARY /SIZE=xxx, where xxx is the size of the library in disk blocks. Use the size of the SCA$EVENT.DAT file in your current SCA library directory as the value to the /SIZE qualifier. o SCA uses a large number of I/Os during LOAD. Loading an SCA library on a heavily used or badly fragmented disk causes the load to be less efficient. You can tell how badly your SCA libraries are fragmented by using the following command: $ DUMP/HEADER/BLOCK=COUNT=0 - _$ DISK:[sca_library_directory]SCA$EVENT.DAT The interesting portion of the output is the Map area. Each retrieval pointer represents a contiguous section on the disk. Because SCA extends SCA libraries 1000 blocks at a time, having a lot of retrieval pointers smaller than this is a strong indication that some defragmentation is needed.