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If The Cap Doesn't Fit...
... swear at it. :-) No, I KNOW that's not right - but it's (for me) an irresistibly bad pun. And it's a natural reaction, too. :-) In a recent customer situation I looked at the RMF Workload Activity Report data for a number of service classes. One WLM Sample count was particularly high: "Capped". In fact I look at, with tooling, SMF and the actual field is R723CCCA. (An IBM... [More]
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Plan Your ESQA Carefully For z/OS Release 11
Thanks to Marna Walle for pointing out this change: In z/OS Release 11 there is a requirement for an additional 1608 bytes of ESQA per address space. To put that in context, I'll do some obvious maths: That's about 1.6MB per 1000 address spaces. It just might be of interest to certain customers I know with thousands of CICS regions in a system, or very large TSO or Batch systems. It's probably not... [More]
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Minor Good News On Coupling Facility Performance Reporting
In recent releases RMF have put the machine serial number into both SMF Type 74 Subtype 4 (Coupling Facility Activity) and SMF Type 70 Subtype 1 (CPU Activity). Actually we get two fields in each case: Plant Number and Sequence Number, which you can put together as eg "51-12345". Soon we'll get another piece of the jigsaw: Partition Number in 74-4. This is a small change but a nice useful one...... [More]
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System z10 CPU Instrumentation
Since I got back off vacation in L'Hérault in late August I've been working on adding z10 support to our CPU analysis code. It's quite a substantial set of changes - and I don't think I'm finished yet . But I'd like to share with you what I've learned so far. But first let's briefly review what's changed with z10. (This is a very brief review and not a tutorial on the subjects mentioned.)... [More]
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Replace String A With String B But Not If It's Part Of String A1
As I mentioned in this blog post DFSORT just shipped a new FINDREP function to do "find and replace". I mentioned an example of where I might use it to replace SMFIDs in SMF records. That example generally works well. But suppose (say, for SMF 42-6 Data Set Performance records) I want to replace "SYS1" with "MVSA" but don't want to replace "SYS1." with "MVSA.". There's something useful about... [More]
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ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW - More Good News
I mentioned ERBSCAN and ERBSHOW in this post from January . This is a handy pair of tools for displaying SMF records - most notably the ones produced by RMF. For the uninitiated you type ERBSCAN in ISPF 3.4 against an SMF data set and it pops up a list of SMF records. Typing ERBSHOW followed by the record number formats the record - especially well if it's one that RMF produced. And the prior post... [More]
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Cache Structure Information
It's fair to say I've written very little in terms of book words these past two days. That's because I've been "doing research" on how the cache structure counters really work. "Doing research" is a euphemism for "finding out how the heck the darned thing works". Which is in itself a positive thing to do - but it does rather get in the way of writing stuff. :-( There is a section in the SMF 74... [More]
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Is It The Structure Or The Content That's Important?
The other three residents are busy doing extensive setup work - and we hope to have some nice measurements later on. (I'm not sure how much later on there actually is, mind.) :-) So I have no RMF or DB2 SMF to play with yet. :-( Meanwhile I'm beginning to come up to speed again after the glorious experience of recovering from moving five time zones to the west. :-) So I actually got to writing... [More]
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Performance Numbers and the Redbook
So, I'm about to start writing. At last! As a team we had a discussion yesterday about how to deal with performance numbers. One of the roles I'm playing on the team is "the guy who writes about performance numbers". So we came to the following conclusions: We really can't talk about products made by other people - such as SAS/MXG or TMON for DB2. That's right out - because of our basic provenance... [More]
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ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW - A Parameter You Might Not Know
Very few people spend as much time as I do down in the guts of individual SMF records. But for those who do ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW is an invaluable tool... ERBSCAN, issued in ISPF 3.4 against an SMF data set, presents you with a list of SMF records and some VERY high level information. Such as the date and time the record was cut, the SMF ID and the record type and subtype. ERBSHOW nnnn, issued from... [More]
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Memories of DFSORT OUTFIL
In September 1997 DFSORT Release 13 was shipped (to coincide with the release of OS/390 Release 4). It took a nice idea from Syncsort and extended it. In case you didn't know OUTFIL allows you to read an input data set (and perhaps sort it) and write to multiple output files from the resulting records - perhaps selecting subsets of the records and reformatting them (and differently to each output... [More]
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System z Technical Conference, San Antonio TX
Last week I was at the System z Tech Conference (again getting my zeds mixed up with my zees). :-) I presented 4 times, one of which was a repeat. What's especially nice is that I got 87 attendees for the "Memory Matters in 2008" presentation - spread across 2 sessions. This was despite the second time being the very last session of the conference... and 22 people still showed up to that! So... [More]
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z/OS Performance Instrumentation Management Techniques wiki
I've just created a wiki to discuss primarily SMF. Mainly from the management perspective, rather than the contents of each individual record. This follows on from things I've mentioned in this blog before. If you'd like to contribute to it (and it is DESPERATELY in need of contributions right now) get a developerWorks screenname and send it to me here . Then I'll enable you to edit the wiki. You... [More]
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Feedback from my UKCMG Mainframe Performance Instrumentation Birds Of A Feather
It was a very good session, even if it was attended by just a "hard core" of mainframe sites. I think everyone said at least something and several said rather more than that. Here are some things I'd like to note from it... There was a general feeling that it'd be useful to have a name for a machine that could be entered on the HMC and flow through to SMF records, particularly Type 70 (CPU). So... [More]
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Humble Pie Regarding DFSORT and SMF
(Also posted to MXG-L Listserver (MXG-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM) which I highly recommend as a place where mainframe performance people hang out.) I must confess I feel slightly foolish about this... :-) After having asked for input into my UKCMG BOF one of the themes that came out was better ways of doing what IFASMFDP does. (I already have this on my agenda - as you'll know if you follow my blog.)... [More]
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