Subscribers to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter can find the 149-page Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, 2021 No. 1, issue on our publications website (https://watsonwalkerpublications.com/). The last quarter has been an action-packed one, so regardless of which group you work in, we believe that you’ll find information in this issue to make your job a little easier or a little more interesting. In this issue we have:
- The latest installment in Todd Havekost’s series of articles about what you can learn from SMF. This article provides a menu of job-level tuning actions that can be used to reduce MSU consumption. This is always a popular topic, but it is even more important in a Tailored Fit Pricing – Enterprise Consumption environment, where you literally pay for every MSU you consume, regardless of the day or time.
- Our User Experiences and Tips article which should be read by every subscriber. This issue has nine real world experiences and time-saving tips, ranging from information about a little-documented CPU performance feature, through a sample DFSORT DCOLLECT reporting program, to an interesting customer observation that “Capping causes capping”. This article has received rave feedback from early reviewers, so don’t miss it.
- A guide to crypto for z/OS performance people. Crypto is a topic that we have worked hard to stay away from. However, it is now everywhere, so performance analysts are understandably curious about what it will do to their systems. Fortunately, one of the best known consultants in Crypto-land, Greg Boyd, kindly agreed to work with us on an article to help those that are crytographically-challenged (like me!). Greg’s article covers all the aspects of crypto that a performance analyst would need to know, including CPACF, Crypto Express cards, RMF reporting, ICSF SMF records, and crypto-related fields in various other SMF records, and is a must-read for all the performance analysts in our audience.
- Mario Bezzi’s Gentle Introduction to Java on z/OS. A couple of hot topics in many z/OS sites are: how do we get the next generation of mainframers interested in SMF; and can they rewrite all the home-grown SMF processing programs before the original authors head off on their round-the-world retirement adventures? Mario suggests a way to address both of these concerns in a ‘five-fer’ article – that is, a single project that delivers five benefits. If these are topics are concerns in your site, take a few minutes to check out Mario’s introductory article.
- A spin-off from Todd’s article about job-level tuning: Sorting out your Sort Performance, is another article by Mario Bezzi (I’ve been working overtime this last quarter, trying to make sure that Mario doesn’t have time to get bored!). Mario’s Sort tuning article is an excellent Primer for someone that hasn’t looked at Sort performance recently – I certainly picked up some tips that will make my sorts a lot more efficient and reliable. We hope to follow this article up with one that discusses DFSort type 16 SMF records and how to use them.
- Last, but by no means least, our quarterly News article. Hot APARs, cool papers, and lukewarm websites. If you don’t have time to read the entire Tuning Letter now, we strongly encourage you to review the News article first. There is a lot of time-sensitive information in the article, and the time that you will save by reading the article will far outweigh the time it takes to read it.
I learned something new in every article in this quarter’s Tuning Letter – you can find the full Table of Contents here. This is our 31st year for Cheryl’s Tuning Letter, and we believe that it is just as valuable and vital now as it was when Cheryl and Tom mailed out thousands of hard-copies of the first issue back in 1991. We want to thank all those subscribers that have been with us for all those years, as well as our crop of recent additions to the Tuning Letter community. Let us hope that the next 30 years will be as exciting as the last 30.
Stay Tuned
Frank Kyne