topic Re: VAX PCSA question in Operating System - OpenVMS

VAX PCSA question

SAMI AHMAD — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:50:11 GMT

I have three questions related to this product:
1- does it require Fortran compiler to compile?
since the guide is talking about compiliing the collector image.
2- how heavy it is on a system to run VAX PCSA ? would it be consuming a lot of system resources and causing performance issues ?

3- Is it a seperately licensed product? comes on which CD ?

thanks

Re: VAX PCSA question

RBrown_1 — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:01:10 GMT

Wow, that is old! I have the Installation guide here for V3.0, and it is dated December 1989.

None of my PCSA manuals mention a collector image as far as I can see. Compiling during installation is rare in VMS software distributed by DEC anyway. So it seems unlikely that Fortran would be required.

I doubt that it would be a heavy system load. It might have been back in 1989, but things have changed since then.

I'm pretty sure it is separately licensed. Pathworks, which replaced PCSA, was. And now after many versions, Pathworks is gone too.

Was there a CONDIST in 1989? I don't know. We got PCSA on a TK50 and a bunch of floppies (probably 5 1/4 inch floppies at that). If you have an old CONDIST, check the index and see.

PCSA seems like an unusual product to run today. It was written for MS-DOS clients, and probably will not play well with Windows.

Re: VAX PCSA question

Hein van den Heuvel — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 05:20:13 GMT

>> VAX PCSA question

Please clarify. Are we talkgin PATHWORKS here? or perhaps a performance collector tool?

>> the guide is talking about compiliing the collector image.

What guide? Please help us help you.
Do you have a link or cd label or document title?

When you mantion VAX, are you using that term loosely to refer to some OpenVMS Machine, perhaps an Alpha or are you really talking about a VAX machine?
What OpenVMS version?

What are you planning to do with PCSA
What problem are you trying to solve, on which platform (Hardware, OS version)
There may well be more suitable tools (T4, ANAL/SYSTEM helpers, Oracle STATS_PACK/WAR, DecPS,...)

Typically performance problem involving Oracle are best addressed by first understanding how oracle is being used, what it is being asked to do and asking oracle what resources it is consuming to do what it is asked to do.

Regards,
Hein van den Heuvel ( at gmail dot com )
HvdH Performance Consulting

Re: VAX PCSA question

SAMI AHMAD — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:24:02 GMT

hi !

I used the PCA long time ago and i remembered it gave nice graphical performance charts and we could go back n look at history data n see how the system was doing at earlier date.
this is what iam trying to achive. what performance monitoring tools comes with Alpha these days where history is maintained if not VAX PCSA ?

regards

Re: VAX PCSA question

Volker Halle — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:45:46 GMT

Do you mean POLYCENTER Performance Advisor (PSPA) ?

PCA is Performance and Covera Analyuzer, part of DECset.

As a 'free' performance collection tool on OpenVMS Alpha and I64, you would want to use T4:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/index.html

Volker.

Re: VAX PCSA question

SAMI AHMAD — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:40:05 GMT

it must be PSPA then .. doent openVMS comes with a product for historical performance monitoring?

Re: VAX PCSA question

Volker Halle — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:45:25 GMT

You could use MONITOR/RECORD to collect performance data. But T4 is much more efficient and the capabilites of TLviz (data viewer GUI) exceed MONITOR by far.

Volker.