Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
Installation and Configuration

Processes in Windows platforms

OpenEdge provides the following optional processes to improve performance in Windows and on UNIX platforms:

Asynchronous Page Writer (APW) — The APW improves database performance by performing overhead operations in the background. These operations provide available buffers, reduce the number of buffers that OpenEdge reads before writing to disk, and reduce the overhead associated with before-image checkpointing (the process of synchronizing the buffer pool of modified blocks to the database).
Before-image Writer (BIW) — The BIW improves performance by continually writing before-image buffers to disk. These writes occur in the background.
After-image Writer (AIW) — The AIW improves performance by continually writing AI buffers to disk soon after OpenEdge fills the buffers.
OpenEdge watchdog (PROWDOG) — The watchdog process cleans up after improperly terminated processes by releasing locks, backing out any live transactions and releasing shared-memory locks, and disconnecting and cleaning up the server’s remote clients.

See OpenEdge Application Server: Administration and OpenEdge Data Management: Database Administration for more information about managing and improving OpenEdge performance.