Re: system tuning question

On 4/22/2016 9:50 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

I find that in almost every case I work, the standard is "acceptable
response times and the batch work gets done 'on time'" What's acceptable
is generally the IT leaders phone not ringing with complaints, and batch
times are the save finished before the on line day starts.

We've lived parallel lives :-/

Trying to get folks to set an actual measurement and to track against it is
much harder than you would ordinarily think. The second you start tracking
things like that, someone in HR gets the bright idea that it should be
written into performance reviews, even if the folks that get measured by it
may not have the ability to affect it much.

I completely agree. It's taken 35 years too many for me to grok that
political / interpersonal issues are often Bigger Deals than technical ones.

So maybe I should amend my post to say something like 'You need a goal
expressed in numbers even if you have to keep that goal a private,
internal goal and not publish it.' I strongly believe that going
through the process of determining a target number has value far beyond
the simple number itself.

The vague hand waving so many of us have lived through (it just seems
slow, deal with it!) almost always has an underlying technical issue.
Thinking about a goal (the dude says his TPS report takes a long time)
will help guide the analyst toward an understanding about what slow
might mean.

Sometimes, working to get to a hard number reveals that there's nothing
technically wrong with the system's performance. The TPS reports are
taking the same amount of CPU and clock time as they always did. But it
turns out that the dude's TPS reports are waiting in a job queue behind
other work. So 'tuning' might mean moving the dude's job to a different
job queue so it doesn't wait. Boom, TPS reports speeded up 1000%.

If one works in a highly political environment, keeping records /
printouts of the status as one tunes can be valuable evidence to
demonstrate that progress is being made against goals. One needs to
show the business benefit of one's technical proficiency to the chain of
command.