Re: IFS Object Count Growing

Hello,

Does calling this pgm harm anything on my i?

No... not unless there's an undiscovered bug. This program was created because older releases of IBM i (actually, OS/400 at the time) didn't have a way to collect IFS data needed for planning system migrations, save/restores, updates, etc.

In newer releases, it's replaced with RTVDIRINF & friends.

Does is delete anything?

Not that I'm aware of... it's purpose is only to collect information.

Does it cause locking of objects?

I suspect it puts shared locks on the directory objects while it's reading them, but I don't know for certain.

Will calling the pgm only produce a report of the IFS?

It reports on a subtree of the IFS, specified in the 2nd parameter. So, if you call it like this:

call qsrsrv parm("METRICS" '/home')

It'll only report on the /home directory, or anything within it (any directories, subdirectories, etc inside /home)

If you specify '/' in the 2nd parameter, it'll analyze all areas of disk that are available to the IFS interface.

I heard that you can specify "EPFS" in the 3nd parameter if you want to restrict the search to local filesystems, but I haven't tried that, myself.

call qsrsrv parm("METRICS" '/' "EPFS")

But, unless you're stuck on a really old release, I would not use QSRSRV today, I'd use RTVDIRINF instead.

And I'd never even consider using QSRSRV from a program (except maybe a one-off program) as it's not an API. It should only be used interactively for administration/housekeeping/planning of your system.