Re: Fw: Screens 'dropping'

   Add to my list
   * We had problems with one particular device, so for that person sign-on
   instead of job description BPCS, I gave her BPCS2 with souped up logging,
   the main challenge was to teach her to use the SIGNOFF *YES keep the log,
   which I even put on her menus.
   * We have had a flakey wall plug ... what was REALLY dropping was the
   power supply for like a blink out ... in one case, the equipment was
   jammed against the wall and plug, and if the user accidentally kicked the
   desk, the power would flicker.  In another case, the wall plug was not
   properly grounded, because we do our own electrical work, and are kind of
   arrogant on behalf of our employees that we all know what we are doing.
   * I have a vague memory that from Management Central you can setup some
   kind of a communications trace of all sorts of traffic ... we used this
   eons ago when what was dropping was an EDI communication ... we'd not get
   all of the data, have to clean up a data mess, retry ...figuring out how
   to run a trace is one challenge, figuring out how to read the data is a
   whole other matter
   * Different points in the connection can have a "time out" when the
   traffic is hung in one buffer ... in OS/400 I allow 90 minutes in case of
   disconnect so user can recover same session ... in CA we can set a couple
   minutes to retry a connection ... I suspect there's other in between
   places with similar variables worth figuring out and checking.
   * We've had PCs where stuff goes crazy on a particular session ... user
   name is TOM with sessions TOMA TOMB TOMC TOMD TOME etc. with all the weird
   stuff happening on TOMC ... after verifying the PC has the gas for many
   concurrent sessions, we go look in BPCS for the status of work areas and
   members named Q*TOMC ... there can be something whacko there ... simply
   deleting them can solve a problem ... BPCS rebuilds clean as needed
   * Perhaps PC overdue for general cleaning ... compress, anti-spyware,
   delete old e-mail, etc.  If problem goes away for a while tanks to a
   reboot, that' a clue ... I sometimes wonder about people who leave their
   400 session on all the time, like they go home, it is still there ... I
   have a GO CMDSCDE reminding people to power off their machines
   occasionally ... they don't need to be consuming electricity all weekend
   * New versions of anything can require more PC resources, but this is
   often disregarded ...most new versions support some new features, and some
   of this  has higher requirements on PC but most people ignore whether this
   takes a PC over the threshhold ... we more likely to go over thanks to
   ordinary work load increasing

   Idea for a vendor nitch service ... a "sizing wizard" performance monitor
   at the client level
   Conceptually like the "sizing questionairre" except it would gather up the
   info on what all you doing & comes back with advice on
   "you have too many aps for your resources"
   "the best bang for least $ investment & time would be to get some more
   * memory
   * faster CPU

   -
   Al Macintyre
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
   http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
   BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
   http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html