CICS BTS considerations

Although BTS itself does not introduce any affinities, and discourages programming techniques that do, it does support existing code that may introduce affinities.

You must define such affinities to workload management. It is particularly important to specify each affinity's lifetime. Failure to do this may restrict unnecessarily the workload management routing options.

It is important to note that a given activity can be run both synchronously and asynchronously. Workload management is only able to honor invocations that are made asynchronously. Furthermore, you are strongly encouraged not to create these affinities, particularly activity and process affinities, because these affinities are synchronized across the BTS-set. This could have serious performance impacts on your systems.

You should also note that, with CICSPlex® SM, the longest time that an affinity can be maintained is while a CMAS involved in the workload is active; that is, an affinity of PERMANENT. If there is a total system failure, or a planned shutdown, affinities will be lost, but activities in CICS will be recovered from the BTS RLS data set.