Saj:
Firstly - you should not ask so many questions, especially unrelated ones in the same thread.
For payment run - technically you can run them concurrently. But one would lock the other and thus one of them would not do very much work, requiring a rerun. It is not recommended to ever run multiple mass activities at the same time.
For performance of the payment run - that depends on many factors. THe database, the hardware, number of processors available, the dataset. Best bet is to use as many processors as available. Define more number ranges than number of processors. Test the interval size/number. There is some amount of overhead for each interval so you don't want too many, but you want enough to use all processors and use them repeatedly so that one long interval does not adversely affect the overall performance.
Create a new thread for the other question.
regards,
bill.
