[ic] Performance issue pulling price from ERP system

[Jonathan Clark]

> I looking for some advice on how to handle pulling real-time pricing
> from an ERP system in "bulk".  Currently, I have:
>
> CommonAdjust   [user-price]
>
> and [user-price] is a usertag that calls out via a socket to an ERP
> system to pull the customer's price.
>
> This works fine for the late-model POS systems I interact with since
> they have little overhead to pull this off.  However, I have one POS/ERP
> platform that is running Business Basic and the overhead to start
> up and pull a price for a given customer/item is significant enough
> that the cart and result pages crawl.
>
> I want to invent some "pre-fetch" type of logic that could request
> multiple item prices from the ERP system as a single request, push
> those values into the session, and then have [user-price] just pull
> from a session buffer.
>
> Am I making sense here?  Any ideas would be appreciated.

Is there a reason why you can't pull in the prices as an overnight batch
job? You are saying that pulling the prices is loading the POS system and
yet you want to hammer it with getting all the prices for the customer in
one go. Every new session/customer would affect the performance of the POS.

As a workaround, maybe your usertag could store them in the session and pull
them from there if present, otherwise look them up.

Just suggestions..

Jonathan
www.webmaint.net