When planning to upgrade your ABAP-based system like SAP S/4HANA or when setting up a conversion project to SAP S/4HANA, you might find out that certain steps still require a lot of time, some even downtime. This applies often to the import of customer-specific transport requests.
Here, you can find some tips & tricks to reduce the required time:
- First and most important: Integrate your transport requests into the upgrade procedure. This works both for single transport requests and for transports belonging to changes in Change Request Management in SAP Solution Manager. You can find further information in a blog post written by Boris Rubarth: “Integrating customer transport requests in updates and upgrades”
- Always use the newest possible version of R3trans. You can find more details in SAP Note 19466 - Downloading SAP kernel patches.
- Check the size and amount of transport requests:
- If you have many smaller transports requests, add the parameters acc_import and activatemerged (both with value ‘true’) to your transport profile,
- If you have large transport requests (‘large’ means more than 50 objects/ request) parallelize your imports using the parameter parallel=<number> in the transport profile. Use <number> to set the number of import processes to be started in parallel. Since the optimal setting depends on many factors, e.g. database, hardware and possibly network performance, you will have to play around with it a bit to find the optimal value.
- Find further information on Transport Profiles on the SAP Help Portal and in the SAP Community Blog Performance optimization during import of ABAP transport.
- Delay or deactivate the generation and the syntax check for the objects inside your transport requests. More information is provided in SAP Note 1069417 - Generation and syntax check of programs after transport.
- Clean-up old transport:
- Run “tp check all” to generate the file “ALL_old.lis” listing files from the transport directory (and subdirectories) which are no longer required.
- Next, run "tp clearold all", which checks which files from “ALL_old.lis” have exceeded their lifetime and deletes those.
- Find further information about Transport Control Program tp on the SAP Help Portal and in the SAP Community Wiki “Deletion of Old Transports”
SAP Note
1223360 provides many more suggestions and pieces of information that you might find helpful in case you are not satisfied with the effects that you achieved after having gone through this blog post.
