Re: Why do people set up their batch submission defaults to run multiple batch jobs at the same time?

It's more than reasonable for users to expect to have their batch jobs run concurrently with other batch jobs. That's the expectation, and often a requirement. It's what multi-user, multi-tasking servers are designed for. It's better workload management, overall.

In situations like you describe, it sounds like logic should have been added to the application to obtain an exclusive lock on a *dtaara, or some other object, in order to prevent other instances of the same from doing work at the same time.

-Nathan.



----- Original Message ----
From: James H. H. Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, May 6, 2010 2:46:33 PM
Subject: Why do people set up their batch submission defaults to run multiple batch jobs at the same time?

I admit that it can be nice not to have to wait for another user to
notice his or her locked-up compilation job, but what if you've got two
batch-by-design jobs that could get into a fight with each other if
allowed to run concurrently?

For probably the fourth or fifth time, I had to clean up a mess that was
partly caused by two batch jobs (running the same program!) getting into
exactly that sort of fight, for exactly that reason.

Isn't "running jobs sequentially, one at a time" the essence of batch
processing?

Why it took me until now to fix it so that they'd be explicitly run
through a "normal" batch queue instead of the default "abby-normal" one,
I dunno.

--
JHHL