Operating System - OpenVMS
1748201 Members
2897 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

 
SOLVED
Go to solution
vmsserbo
Super Advisor

system tuning and bottle necks

How do I determine if my systems need tuning or have bottlenecks. I work with about 80 vax systems running openvms. Are there commands I can use or reports ?
17 REPLIES 17
Arch_Muthiah
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

The best utility is DECset, under this there is a DIGITAL
Performance and Coverage Analyzer (PCA, which can be used to collect and analyze various types of system data.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/DOC/decset.html
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/DOC/73FINAL/5605/5605_pro.pdf


Archunan
Regards
Archie
Arch_Muthiah
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

The utility you can use is DECset, under this there is a DIGITAL
Performance and Coverage Analyzer (PCA, which can be used to collect and analyze various types of system data.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/DOC/decset.html
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/DOC/73FINAL/5605/5605_pro.pdf


Archunan
Regards
Archie
Karl Rohwedder
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

If your users are satisfied, you don't need tuning :-)

Tools you can use:
- MONITOR (included in VMS) to view various aspects of the system live, offline or via summary reports (see SYS$EXAMPLES for a DCL routine to setup a regular job)

- T4 (you can find it via the OpenVMS homepage) can create very nice graphic reports and allows to store history data

- TDC (The Data Collector) together with ECP can also create nice graphical or textual reports

- there are some more comercial products

- not to forget AMDS or AVAILMAN, which give are nice online overview (green/yellow/red) od CPU,MEMORY,IO

We use T4 and ECP to automatically create reports and store historical data.

regards Kalle
Arch_Muthiah
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

We have MONITOR, ACCOUNTING, and AUTOGEN utility also, using which we can understand and improve the performance of the three major hardware resources---CPU, memory, and disk I/O.

AUTOGEN mostly will do best tuning in terms of System Parameters.


Archunan
Regards
Archie
Duncan Morris
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

the best reporting tool will be your users!

You can always tune a system to get a little more mileage out of it, but is the effort of tuning rewarded by the gains? If your users have specific areas of concern, then you should check out these areas.

You can find performance and tuning guides in the VMS documentations set. See OpenVMS Performance Management here

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/os73_index.html


Phillip Thayer
Esteemed Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

You should always listen to what your users are saying as far as system performance. However, you still need to have some kind of proactive monitoring in place to be able to spot problems before the users start flooding your phone with calls that the system is slow.

MONITOR, T4, ECP, DECSet PCA, AMDS and Availman are all tools that can provide these type of proactive reports to possibly see problems before they occur. Check the performance tuning manual referenced with a link in a previous post for what you should be looking for.

The thing to remember also is that you can overtune th system and actually make it run worse than it is now. If you don't see anything on the reports that points to a problem based on the Performance Tuning manual then don't touch the system and let it go on chugging. Also, with 80 system to manage you should probably look to something that can provide a summary screen with the capability to drill down into systems that are flagged with problems. That would mean AMDS would probably be your best bet for keeping track of all the systems.

Phil
Once it's in production it's all bugs after that.
Arch_Muthiah
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

You may be knwon this manual, "OpenVMS Performance management", It is very good manual to understand OpenVMS system's performance related things.
You will become so confident on OpenVMS once complete reading this manual.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/DOC/73final/documentation/pdf/OVMS_73_perf_mang.PDF

This manual addresses system managers and other experienced users responsible
for maintaining a consistently high level of system performance, for diagnosing
problems on a routine basis, and for taking appropriate remedial action.

OpenVMS System Dump Analyzer Utility Manual also helpfull system manager who must investigate the causes of system failures
and debug kernel-mode code, such as a device driver level.

Thanks
Archunan


Regards
Archie
Ian Miller.
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Computer systems are bought to run applications therefor it is application performance as percieved by the users. Of course user perception is subjective but unfortunally they are the people paying the bills.

You need to determine the key performance indicators and measure those. These are often the time to perform some important operation or the number of some operations performed within a certain time.

Also note the important time is not measured on the vms system but it is the time as seen from the users terminal.

The tools mentioned are excellent for measuring system metrics but system metrics like I/O per second are not what you should concentrate on. The tools are good for investigating performance problems.

The VMS Performance Management manual
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6491/6491pro.html
or in pdf
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/documentation/pdf/OVMS_73_perf_mang.PDF

is the one to start with. The tools already mentioned like T4 and EPC have manuals which are good for understanding the tool but not for understanding your overall performance management.

The PCA tool (part of DECset) previously mentioned is a tool for looking for performance problems in a specific program. This would be useful when you have determined that a specific application is not performing well enough.

What aspect of system performace are your users complaining about?
____________________
Purely Personal Opinion
Arch_Muthiah
Honored Contributor

Re: system tuning and bottle necks

Miles,

Is this for VAX openVMS?

Then you should use "Dynamic Load Balancer Plus", this is specially for VAX/OpenVMS system.

Dynamic Load Balancer Plus (DLB Plus) is the original OpenVMS on-line dynamic tuning product. DLB Plus monitors the system load, any bottlenecks and makes adjustments to process memory usage and CPU scheduling parameters. These adjustments enhance system performance.

DLB Plus makes adjustments dynamically, continuously as system loads change. Dynamic tuning results in a balanced and well-tuned OpenVMS system.

Benefits include:
efficient use of CPU and memory resources
more consistent response times continuous adjustment based on the current environment conditions.

Archunan
Regards
Archie