AS/400 falls asleep -- MIDRANGE-L

We are on AS/400 model 170 OS/400 V5R1 mixed mode, with more peopleconnected via PCs than via twinax.

We recently moved our AS/400 to our main factory in the boonies, and madecorporate offices HQ the remote site. There's a few odds & ends not hookedup yet, such as the ECS line. I opted to remain in the city, and commuteto the AS/400 occasionally. Since the move, there are some unexpected newproblems to struggle with.

There are actually several things going wrong, such that when we have anincident, it is seldom obvious what is the cause this time.

One problem is, it seems to me the AS/400 at random moments decides to goto sleep.

Some days I see this happen several times in the same day.
Some days I go whole day and not see it happen.

At the remote site on twinax, I am looking at the input inhibited X, andthe only thing I did was try to scroll in SEU to another page, or select areport to change, nothing major ... now that this has happened severaltimes, I know to work on something that does not require keying on the 400,and in 5 minutes it clears & is Ok.My co-workers are on Client Access, and they have some kind of time outthat disconnects them, when this happens. Other folks on VPN from home ortravel, same deal. Phone to other site ... is 400 sluggish for you rightnow? Oh yes, they having similar problem.We check in the "computer communications room" and see that the Perle sayscommunications is normal with the AS/400.

Then when the 400 "wakes up" I go right into GO STATUS andWRKACTJOB response time data, WRKPRB, DSPLOG for last 1/2 hour, checkmessages on QSYSOPR and other places, and I cannot find a smoking gun. Wehabitually run only one JOBQ, our disk space is at about 62% used, there'sabout 1500 reports in spool, the largest being 50,000 pages of errormessages from a runaway job I had to kill.


Seems to me the AS/400 is ignorant of the fact that it had a nap.

I have exhausted interrogating "the usual suspects" and now I looking overWRKSYSVAL stuff I not looked at in eons, such as DSPJOBTBL, and I lookingfor the manual on STRSST to see if there is some error log incident ratethat not rise to the level of WRKPRB noticing, but when the AS/400 is busywith whatever errors, it is not busy catering to the humans.


We're too cheap to have any of the performance tools.

Since shortly before the move, there has been a small reduction in thetotal # of users, with a marginal increase in the number of sessions perwork station. I figure the overall demand on AS/400 resources has notaltered dramatically in many months. Printers is one area I should perhapsfigure out how to check how much of a drain, if any ... we have ups anddowns in how many concurrent printers talking to the 400, and currently weare on the way up. However, right after 400 wakes up, I have checkedprinters, and not seen much activity there associated with 400 nap time.

There has been no significant program changes in the last few weeks, that Imight think contributes to this ... I am tuning some new reports. Therewas one that used to take 30 minutes & I changed how the files accessed,shaving 3 minutes off the run time.

Years ago we had someone run a certain query on-line, that joins severalfiles of over a million records, but I would always hear from the culprit,because his work station also locked up, and in fact the entire 400 wouldlockup until we could kill the session in question. I will have to teachsomeone at the formerly remote site how to do this, and God help us if theculprit is on the main console.

I used to get MIDRANGE_L many years ago but the volume of traffic was morethan I could stand ... in the interim there has been a regular famine ofother good places to get answers, and I am experiencing a growth inchallenges that need answers that I suspect MIDRANGE_L would be a goodplace to ask.


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Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor