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There are several ways that this can be implemented. But to do a meaningful job of continuously improving performance, I really see no way other than getting real about using the tools provided by IBM to manage performance, and that can be damn near a full time job. Does your CEO want this bad enough to hire another IT person whose exclusive job will be performance management? There are a bunch of 3rd party outfits that provide software to capture the IBM performance data & put them into fancy graphs & charts ... although I doubt that a non-technical person is going to comprehend their significance. You might contact JDE user groups ... I not know any URLs ... to ask what kind of response time seems to be typical in that industry. One way is to get aggressive about kicking people off the system. For example, suppose the reason person-A had to wait 2 minutes was because person-B was updating the same record for a different reason, so you solve that by going from 250 users on the system at the same time to 10 people at a time & mandate people working 3 office shifts & weekends. I do not consider that to be a realistic solution, but I mention it so that you mention it & people are horrified & eager to accept some other solution that they might not consider if you had not first suggested the horrible scenario. Get your CEO's request in writing & use it to authorize a visit by your local IBM partners. What you want from the partners are their pricing estimates to upgrade your memory & processor speed & what this will cost the company long term. For an investment of a few thousand dollars, depending on your AS/400 model, you can have a dramatic increase in overall performance. Another thing you want to check is whether you have the right model for your current usage. AS/400s are optimized for batch, interactive, web, PC connectivity, etc. Companies buy AS/400 based on needs of the moment. Application connections evolve. Now you might not neccessarily have the best model for your reality. The time to switch is every 3-5 years when you replace AS/400 with newer technology anyway, but perhaps the CEO is willing to spend $250,000 or whatever to do that right now. A few years ago, my CEO was inundated by complaints about performance, after I had warned people that a certain upgrade would hurt performance for some users, but I did not know by how much. He came to ask me if a faster communication line to a certain remote site would help their performance. I told him that we could not be sure without me doing some analysis that would take several days ... could I get back to him on this after I do that analysis? He accepted that. A few weeks later I reported back to him with the results of my performance analysis. I told him that I had logged the causes of various kinds of slow-downs & that only 10% of the time was a remote site person kept waiting because the volume of traffic on the communication line was filled up & more load wanting to travel. I told him that the # 1 cause of people being held waiting was contention for stuff on the hard disk & that this was global, affecting people at all sites. I explained to him what memory cache is & how more memory for cache can mean less demand on hard disk & faster access to the data, and that IBM says that when we have at least 2 successful hits on cache for every 1 miss, that cache is effective for our applications & that we are getting 7 to 1 ratio meaning very high re-use of access to same item #s & customer #s & etc. so that buying more memory would be the # 1 most useful thing to help performance of all users, including the remote site that interested him. I showed him pricing on more memory. He approved the purchase of more memory. Richard Reeve said > I would start by setting the system value(s) relating to machine pool size, > max active and a few others. Ideally you need to change ONE thing & evaluate the impact before you change another ONE thing, because some changes can be counter productive & need to be changed back. Now on the AS/400 that I am managing, I have the whole thing setup for auto-performance ... it tunes itself. Mike.Crump writes: > My thought is that you use another metric for > response time. This assumes you can get someone to buy into the idea that > sometimes response time is an application problem or design issue. I think > this is real critical. What we measure is the 'distribution curve of > response times'. Everyone is going to be slightly different but what we > measure is the standard 4 buckets: 0-1 second, 1-2 seconds, 2-4 seconds, > 4+ seconds. 95% of our transactions fall within sub-second, 98% within 2 > seconds, and so on. Right now I forget how we track that but I am pretty > sure it is a component of performance tools. I entirely agree with Mike. There is only so much you can do to optimize your AS/400 to process the data efficiently, but when you have data bases with large numbers of dead records & software that reads through all the dead records to get to the good records, the obvious solution is to fix the dead records & to prioritize which software needs adj. I have been rather aggressive in the last year attacking dead records. GO DISKTASKS report tells me which are the biggest files. Some of them NEED to have all that data, while I am finding some for which our ERP has made no provision to get rid of records once we are done with them, so we have old unwanted records going back for years. Establish software to clean out files on a regular basis & this means better performance in access to those files & also healthier disk space. There is also the topic of garbage in data bases that can contaminate good data. I ask my users to let me know when they experience sluggish performance & whether this seems to be OVERALL anything they do, or if there are specific programs that seem to be sluggish, when everything else is running fine. Several months ago I implemented a major modification for data entry. The end users are now able to do this application using 1/3 as many keystrokes per transaction. They love it. How did I manage that? We studied the input screen ... which of these fields are never entered, rarely entered, almost always the same stuff? We ended up with the cursor skipping some fields, with a command key to get at the rarely used fields if needed. We altered the clear screen subroutine so that some screens retained copy of data keyed in on prior entry ... easy enough for them to field exit a field if in fact it will be changed. There was a particular screen they could not use because the data processing lacked some flexibility they needed. Fixing that was part of the modification effort. The point to be made here is that in the processing of any given transaction, the end user might have 100 keystrokes, then press enter & the computer does its thing ... you can do stuff to help the computer do its thing faster, but we are still constrained by the end user having to do 100 keystrokes per transaction ... if you can manipulate the screen rules & screen design to cut that down significantly, then that can have a major impact on the performance of those users, and also their accuracy. We also looked at how they know they keyed in the right stuff, and made some improvements to the visibility of what they had keyed in. > From: prumschlag@phdinc.com > > I have been asked to come up with a plan so that no user will ever have to > wait > more than 30 seconds for an AS/400 interactive response. The request (from > the > company president) was based on a completely out-of-context observation of > one > user who had to wait 2 minutes for a response to one particular screen on > one > occurrence. The president's intent is good, he just does not know what he > is > asking for. > > Because I don't believe his request can be or should be satisfied as he > worded > it, I am planning to reshape it into an initiative to monitor both average > and > longest response times, set goals (not guarantees) for both, be able to > explain > exceptions, and propose a series of solutions that are most cost effective. > I > will report this to him on a monthly basis. Sounds pretty noble, huh? > > Just for the record, Ops Navigator shows that throughout the day our average > response time is normally under 2 seconds, and often under 1 second. We are > running JDE World on a 730 dual processor. > > I am sure there are hundreds of ways to approach this (bigger processor, > more > memory, more disks, better management of file sizes, better scheduling of > batch > jobs, LPAR(?), separate test box, programming changes, yada, yada, yada.). > > Here is my question (finally). Other than pulling out the Performance > Tuning > manuals, is there a quicker/easier/better way to approach this? Remember, > my > goal is to develop meaningful performance measures and be able to identify > solutions to performance problems. > > Thanks. > Phil MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac) BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838
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