Experimenting with querying WMI from Perl with Win32::OLE, I ran across the following WMI query options in an Perl example from Microsoft’s Script Center:
$colItems = $objWMIService->ExecQuery ("SELECT * FROM Win32_Share","WQL",wbemFlagReturnImmediately | wbemFlagForwardOnly);
After some digging, I found the following explanation of those options wbemFlagReturnImmediately, and wbemFlagForwardOnly:
Because WMI manages the object, semisynchronous mode is more secure than asynchronous mode. However, if you use semisynchronous mode with more than 1,000 instances, instance retrieval can monopolize the available resources, which can degrade the performance of the program or script and the computer using the program or script. Each object takes up the necessary resources until the memory is released.
To work around this condition, you can call the method with the iFlags parameter set with the wbemFlagForwardOnly and wbemFlagReturnImmediately flags to instruct WMI to return a forward-only SWbemObjectSet. A forward-only SWbemObjectSet eliminates the performance problem caused by a large data set by releasing the memory after the object is enumerated.
[from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384832(v=vs.85).aspx ]
I wanted to put this somewhere, because I’m sure I’ll forget.
