Understanding Background Job Processing

by Ruchitha

In background processing, the SAP System automatically runs any report or program in the specified time or time intervals. The background processing system starts your job and runs the program(s) that you specify. Afterwards, you can check whether your job was executed successfully and display a log of any system messages.

Features:

• Running a report in the background does not tie up the SAP sessions you are currently working with.
• You can shift the execution of reports to the evening or other periods depending on load on the SAP System.
• Background processing is the only way you can execute long-running jobs.

Background jobs run in a special type of work process—the background work process—that is different from dialog work processes in two ways:

• A dialog step has a run-time limit that prevents users from interactively running especially long reports. By default, the system terminates any dialog step in a transaction that exceeds 300 seconds. Although the limit can be changed (in the system profile parameter rdisp/max_wprun_time ), it is always in effect for dialog work processes. No such limit applies to background work processes.
• Background work processes allocate memory differently than dialog work processes so that background work processes can become as large as they need to in allocated memory to allow for processing large volumes of data.