Program autoinstall reduces system administration, virtual storage usage, and, potentially, restart times.
Without autoinstall, you have to define all new programs, mapsets, and partitionsets to CICS® before they can be used. Autoinstall eliminates this requirement, enabling these resources to be used without prior definition. Furthermore, the need to maintain predefined definitions also disappears, leading to a significant saving in system administration effort.
There is a saving in virtual storage within the CICS address space, as the definitions of autoinstalled resources do not occupy table space until they are generated.
If you are using program autoinstall with cataloging, restart times are similar to those of restarting a CICS region that is not using program autoinstall. This is because, in both cases, resource definitions are reinstalled from the catalog during the restart. The definitions after the restart are those that existed before the system was terminated.
If you are using autoinstall without cataloging, CICS restart times are improved because CICS does not install definitions from the CICS global catalog. Instead, definitions are autoinstalled as required whenever programs, mapsets, and partitionsets are referenced following the restart.
See the CICS Recovery and Restart Guide for information on cataloging.
Startup times are faster than for a region that does not use program autoinstall, because program definitions are installed singly, as required, rather than all together at startup.