Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

[Neil Palmer <neilpalmer400mr@xxxxxxxx>]

Lukas,

Your problem is the two mirrored disk drives, so you basically really only have 
a single drive system as far as performance goes.  In other words, typical crap 
PC disk performance. ;-)
We NEVER recommend a 2 disk mirrored system (although once in a while a 
customer will go for it).  We always recommend a minimum 4 drive RAID solution 
- and usually a minimum 2GB memory.

Have you turned on dynamic caching?  (WRKSYSSTS, F21 to make sure you have 
Intermediate or Advanced assistance level, then F11 a couple of times, change 
all from *FIXED to *CALC - you can;t change the *MACHINE pool).
Do you have automatic performance adjustment turned on (system value QPFRADJ 
set to 2 or 3) ?
 
Neil Palmer, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
 
(This account not monitored for personal mail,
remove the last two letters before @ for that)


----- Original Message ----
From: Lukas Beeler <l.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 9:21:36 AM
Subject: RE: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch


> processors.  But I also do FTP all the time and I don't see the "grind
to a
> halt" that you speak of.  Besides, how often do you send these images?
How
> long does it take?

As it is my job to maintain most of our customers systems, it's
something i do very often (not on the same machine, though). Even the
newer 600 CPW System are get very slow when I'm transferring CUMPTF or
Release Image catalogs to the machine.

I'm currently upgrading many older 520 from V5R3 to V5R4. Usually this
process takes about 12 hours, everything included. The customer has to
pay for this, just so that he has a current operating system. And a
minor Release Change (V5R3->V5R4 is more similar to XP SP1 -> XP SP2
than 2000 -> XP). 

I agree with your general point that one shouldn't judge a system based
upon the performance it has when doing maintenance work on it, but it's
still something that gets on my nerves.

Remember, these are very baseline systems, featuring just the minimal
components (2x36GB Mirrored, 600/50CPW, 1GB). We have some larger
customers with faster systems (the biggest featuring a 2400/2400
Enterprise 520) which are not that slow, but the enterprise system with
the 750GB Disk Space cost more than half a million.