(Originally posted 2008-06-12.)
It’s fair to say I’ve written very little in terms of book words these past two days. That’s because I’ve been “doing research” on how the cache structure counters really work. “Doing research” is a euphemism for “finding out how the heck the darned thing works”. Which is in itself a positive thing to do – but it does rather get in the way of writing stuff. 😦
There is a section in the SMF 74 Subtype 4 called the “Cache Data Section”. I thought you got one for each cache structure. It turns out you can get more than one. There are things inside cache structures called storage classes. So I trawled through all the customer data I have gathered over the past year and in only one> structure (not one customer) did I see a count of 2 sections. This for XBM. Even DB2, which uses multiple castout classes per structure, only has one storage class. So I don’t feel bad about my code assuming only one.
The other thing one needs to know – and it’s far more important – is that for every system connecting to a structure the Cache Data Section contains identical values. It’s rather like the Disk Cache statistics in SMF 74 Subtype 5: The controller / coupling facility maintains the stats. So it’s no use summing them.
When it comes to what’s in the section there are umpteen counters: 5 read counters, 5 write counters, 4 cross-invalidation counters and umpteen others. In my code we calculate read hit percentages, read-to-write ratios and lots of other things besides. Figuring out what all these counters mean and which ones are important is what’s euphemistically called “a work in progress”. 🙂
But the real learning point is that each exploiter does it differently. So, two examples:
- A store-through cache doesn’t do castouts. A store-in one does. And then there’s a “cross invalidation” cache that doesn’t either. But then it doesn’t actually store data to consider the fate of.
- DB2 Data Sharing with GBPCACHE(CHANGED) doesn’t write unchanged data to the cache structure.
And so it goes on.
I think it would be a noble aim to describe all these counters in terms that are related to exploiters. And also in terms we can all understand. Let’s hope it doesn’t remain just a noble aim. 🙂
Mainframe, Performance, Topics 