1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
2. Correction to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
3. IBM Red Alert
4. Cheryl Blogs at SHARE
5. Our Software Products
1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
The sixty-five page 2009 No. 1 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on February 28th. You may visit our Web site at http://www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information. The following is a summary of just some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
Parmlib Analysis: IEAOPTxx
Most of this issue is devoted to the IEAOPTxx (OPT) parmlib member, and provides recommendations for setting the parameters. OPT is primarily used by Workload Manager (SRM) to provide details that do not reside in the WLM service policy. I can’t stress the importance of this parmlib member enough. Using some of the IBM defaults, or overriding the defaults with improper values, can result in performance degradation (up to 10% of your system) or system outages.
The timing of this article is important because most installations are currently running z/OS 1.8, 1.9, or 1.10. Half of the OPT parameters are new, and even more have changed with these three z/OS releases. I think that you’ll find that this comprehensive article will save days of research time, because this information can’t be found in any other single source. Each section describes what the parameter does, the performance considerations of changing the value, how to measure the effect of changing a parameter, our recommendations, and references. I’ve researched APARs, listservers, IBM Redbooks, CMG papers, SHARE sessions, and the Internet for additional information that will help your systems programmer determine which value to use. You’ll find that it’s well worth the time to assign this whole issue to a systems programmer in order to improve your performance.
Workload Manager Update
Because most of the OPT parameters were changed to benefit the Workload Manager, a companion article is provided that shows the new facilities provided in z/OS 1.9 and 1.10 in WLM. I also describe some free tools available from the WLM developers. Without exception, the changes either provide a much more stable system or provide performance improvements.
Elsewhere in This Issue
Our User Experiences section provides more HiperDispatch experiences. InReader Feedback, a reader raves about the SMF type 42, subtype 6 record, and we provide more zAAP exploiters. In the News section, I include a description of IBM’s z/OS 1.10 Information Center (Beta), New Function APARs, HIPER APARs, and our usual Washington Systems Center summary.
SHARE Conference
We know that budgets are tight these days, but if you have anything budgeted for training, we think that the SHARE conferences provide some of the very best training for the cost. (Second, of course, to our Tuning Letter which is the best bargain for training/performance information!) If there’s room in your budget, we strongly suggest that you consider SHARE in Austin on March 1-5. If not then, how about Denver on August 23-28? See www.share.org.
2. Correction to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 1
In this issue, I had quoted an earlier newsletter by saying “Each time that you manually vary a CP offline or online, and each time that IRD varies a CP offline or online, the SRM constant is changed.”
That statement is incorrect because the SRM constant is not changed with IRD. This was corrected in Cheryl’s List #125, but I forget to change it. Thanks to Fabio Massimo Ottaviani from EPV Technologies for catching it this quickly.
3. IBM Red Alert
IBM issues Red Alerts for especially important APARs. You may subscribe to their service at http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/redAlerts/home.html.
You may have noticed my typo in the last Cheryl’s List for the IBM Red Alert mentioned at that time. I said that the Red Alert was released on 2008.01.29. It should have said 2009.01.28.
The following Red Alert (2009.02.26) was recently released:
Compatability [sic] maintenance required for DFSMSrmm when installing PTFs for OA22132
For all DFSMSrmm customers applying APAR OA22132 PTF’s UA90459 (z/OS 1.10), UA90457 (z/OS 1.9), UA90454 (z/OS 1.8), or upgrading to one of these releases using a serverpac which contains this maintenance, please be aware that the fix for OA22706 must be installed on all other systems in the sysplex sharing the RMM CDS. If OA22132 is installed on one (or more) systems without the compatibility fixes for OA22706, lower level systems sharing the RMM CDS will be unable to read the new/updated volume records. The PTFs for OA22706 will need to be installed on those systems to resolve the problem. Please see the APAR OA22706 for detailed symptoms.
APAR OA22132 was New Function support for the enhanced D/T3592 Model E06 (Tape Drive) and went PE.
4. Cheryl Blogs at SHARE
Let’s make that “Cheryl will TRY to blog at SHARE”. We’ve set up a blog at www.cherylwatson.blogspot.com, and I’ll be trying to post things during this coming week at SHARE that I think will be of interest to both our Tuning Letter subscribers and our Cheryl’s List subscribers. If I get too busy to keep up, I’ll let you know on the blog.
I’ll also be speaking at three sessions:
3117 – What Does a Capacity & Performance Specialist Do Anyway?, Wednesday, 1:30 pm
2549 – Meet the Experts: WLM, Performance and Capacity Planning Topics, Thursday, 4:30 pm
2509 – Cheryl’s Hot Flashes #21, Friday, 9:30 am
Hope to see you in Austin this week (March 1-6).
5. Our Software Products
In this latest Tuning Letter, we made several references to our software products, BoxScore and GoalTender, but didn’t have room to go into more detail in that issue. So here are things that you might not know about our products.
BoxScore
BoxScore is a SAS application that compares all of your job steps or transactions in one configuration (hardware and software) and compares to the same job steps or transactions that run at another time in another configuration. By using a CPU-per-I/O method of comparison, we can successfully compare the same work that is run with different volumes of data. Traditionally, BoxScore has been used after a hardware upgrade to confirm that you received the capacity that you had expected. We consider it a companion piece to IBM’s zPCR because while zPCR will tell you what to expect, BoxScore then tells you what you got. Our upcoming enhancement to BoxScore will take into account the addition of zIIP and zAAP engines.
Lately, BoxScore has been used to evaluate the impact of HiperDispatch in several z10 installations. And several sites have started using it to determine the impact due to a change in an application or subsystem. One claims processing application was changed to use a different database technique, and the programmers found a large increase in CPU for one of the programs by using BoxScore. The program had a design flaw that showed up when the database was changed. At another site BoxScore found that a new release of DB2 increased the CPU time of one application by 10%. Once the DBA changed some default parameters, the application took even less time than on the previous release.
As many of our BoxScore customers have found out, purchase of the product also provides free phone consultation and conference calls with me personally. This can be especially helpful if you are having a disagreement with either your hardware vendor or software vendor about their product, or need your management to understand what happened along the way to that upgrade.
We are also working with the WPS team to provide full BoxScore support later this year. WPS is a SAS alternative.
For more information on BoxScore, see www.watsonwalker.com/boxscore.html.
GoalTender
GoalTender is our (assembler) application that keeps track of WLM policies, and provides advice on how to improve your policy. It also monitors how WLM is managing your particular system, and when you need to change your goals. What makes GoalTender unique is two things:
- It provides recommendations by me to help you understand what is happening to your system and how to improve your policy.
- This is the only application that can provide a complete history of your service policy (even SMF doesn’t include the whole policy), and include every modification that was made, any operator override of the policy (such as moving work to another service class), and provide a complete log of all WLM service policy activity.
This is your Workload Manager Health Checker on steroids! For more information on GoalTender, see www.watsonwalker.com/goaltender.html.
Stay Tuned!