Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2017-03-13.) If confronted by a plethora1 of things to manage you have to be careful with the approach you take. And so it is with Coupling Facility structures. Usually I would look at the biggest structures – whether memory, request rate, or CPU is the metric of “bigness”. And normally I’m expecting aContinue reading “Structural Analysis”

(Originally posted 2017-03-11.) Not sugar and spice and all things nice. 🙂 Seriously, I'm interested in how Workload Manager (WLM) goals come to be. I've talked about WLM quite a bit over the years and one theme has repeated itself a number of times: “Just how did you arrive at that goal?” As I wroteContinue reading “What Are Goals Made Of?”

(Originally posted 2017-02-25.) So here we are, barely one week on, with another episode. As I indicated, we had bits of this in the can when we put Episode 9 together. It was really nice to interview Elpida, and we have ideas for a couple more items in a similar vein; I always contemplated thisContinue reading “Mainframe Performance Topics Podcast Episode 10 “234U””

(Originally posted 2017-02-18.) In Lost For Words With DDF I wrote about matching up Client DB2 and Server DB2 Accounting Trace (SMF 101) records – for DDF. In this post I'm writing about a more generally relevant technique for DDF. In fact I've just completed some prototype code for this and, of course :-), thrownContinue reading “DDF Networking”

(Originally posted 2017-02-17.) It's been a long time since I… … recorded a podcast episode. But Marna and I have had lots of commitments since we last did. But we're back, and intend to stay that way. Indeed we have bits of Episode 10 “in the can”. And such a lot has happened in theContinue reading “Mainframe Performance Topics Podcast Episode 9 “Back In Black””

(Originally posted 2017-02-12.) I'm lost for words with DDF, I really am. “What's up with him?” my one reader asks. 🙂 So let me explain… I debuted a presentation last year called “More Fun With DDF”. But I've made progress since then. So what do I add to the front of this title? “Still”? “Yet”?Continue reading “Lost For Words With DDF”

(Originally posted 2017-01-15.) What is a batch suite? That might seem like a silly question to ask but it’s inspired by some significant enhancements to our Batch reporting. Dave Betten and I have worked hard on these as time permitted over more than a year. Traditional Definition Of A Suite Traditionally, a batch suite isContinue reading “The Suite Spot”

(Originally posted 2016-11-13.) Back in the Summer I talked about z13 Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) in Born With A Measuring Spoon In Its Mouth. I shared that I was feeling my way forward, and discovering others were doing likewise. Here we are a few months later and my code has come on in leaps and bounds.1Continue reading “SMT – Some Actual Graphs”

(Originally posted 2016-10-29.) We wanted to get this episode out much sooner, but things conspired against us somewhat. Not least someone we really wanted to interview – to kick off a whole series of topics – having technical troubles. So we went a different way from what we intended. And we also had a fewContinue reading “Mainframe Performance Topics Podcast Episode 8 “Queue Me Up””

(Originally posted 2016-10-22.) Seasoned readers will recognise the title of this post as a bad pun, rather than a mis-spelling. [1] One emergent theme in our code for Parallel Sysplex Performance is treating individual coupling facility structures on their merits. For example, lock structures are different from cache structures. But there is much commonality inContinue reading “Right On Queue”