Re: V5R1 STRTRC problems -- MIDRANGE-L

I can respond to your comments below....

You can have more than one PEX session, and you can have more than one
trace started with STRTRC, active on the system at a time.

The restriction is that a job can be in one PEX collection or one trace at
a time; you cannot trace the same job two times at the same time.

Using STRTRC, you do not need to use STRSRVJOB.  However, the STRTRC
command allows you to specify the job name directly (see the JOB
parameter).  So yes, you can trace jobs other than your own.    In
addition, the STRTRC command allows you to specify up to 8 job names on one
STRTRC invocation - you can start a single trace that will collect the
trace on up to 8 specific jobs at one time.  In order to trace 8 jobs using
TRCJOB, you needed to have 8 jobs in which you did the STRSRVJOB/TRCJOB
(since you can only STRSRVJOB on a single job at a time).

In addition, STRTRC allows the specification of a generic job name.  Any
job specified on the STRTRC command that is not a fully qualified name
(######/USERID/JOBNAME) is considered to be a generic job name.  Only one
trace started with STRTRC that traces a job with a generic name can run on
the system at a time.  Trying to start a second 'generic trace' will result
in an error message.

When tracing multiple jobs with the STRTRC command, you can later use the
PRTTRC command to print out all the trace information, or you can print it
out for a subset of the jobs that were traced.

STRTRC eliminates many problems TRCJOB had, including:
- STRTRC has significantly improved performance characteristics,
particularly on call-intensive applications (it is much less intrusive -
however, ENDTRC may take a while to complete - it's probably a good idea to
submit the ENDTRC command to batch)
- STRTRC has a much larger buffer size (up to 4Gig, whereas TRCJOB only had
16Mb)
- STRTRC allows multiple jobs to be traced with one STRTRC invocation
- STRTRC eliminates the need to use STRSRVJOB to trace other jobs
- More granular timestamps in the trace output (microseconds instead of
milliseconds)
- More granular database statistics in the trace output


Dawn May
A biased developer who worked on the new job trace!





                      Vernon Hamberg
                      <vhamberg@attbi.co        To:       
midrange-l@midrange.com
                      m>                        cc:
                      Sent by:                  Subject:  V5R1 STRTRC problems
                      midrange-l-admin@m
                      idrange.com


                      03/29/2002 04:50
                      PM
                      Please respond to
                      midrange-l





<snip>

If someone says that you can only have 1 PEX session at a time (as the
Redbook says) on the system, I know this is not true. And TRCJOB never had
that kind of restriction. Maybe one per job, but that was the case with
TRCJOB--no loss.

2. TRCJOB (and STRJOBTRC if you have Perf Tools) were connected to
STRSRVJOB. I.e., if you had run STRSRVJOB and then TRCJOB, it collected
data over the serviced job, not your own, as is the case if you are not
servicing another job.

STRTRC does not do this. So we have lost what could be an important bit of
functionality, IMO.

<esnip>