3 Key AS/400 Performance Indicators

f the nice features of the AS/400 and iSeries platformcommand WRKACTJOB. This will give you an
is it's reliability and administrative requirements. Butinstantaneous snap shot of all the jobs running on the
even in light of this as a system administrator yousystem along with important pieces of information like
should also be looking and monitoring key datahow much processor time and storage it has
elements to create a baseline of performance metrics.consumed.
This data can then be used to gauge system capacityFor a more in depth analysis of job activity and
and sizing needs for the future. The critical areas weperformance tuning be sure to check out the features
will focus on are disk space, job monitoring andbuilt into the iSeries Navigator tool or as I refer to it as
memory utilization using the tools you already have onOps Nav. You can do very detailed and in depth
your system.analysis on jobs utilizing the underlying DB2 database
First you will want to tackle any disk storage issues.including graphical tools to show query and SQL
The easiest way to clear out disk space is to findbreakdowns. With Ops Nav you can also create nice
what objects are using up all the disk space to beginlittle charts and graphs of key system metrics that are
with. This is very simply to do using the Display Objectsure to make your manager happy.
Description command DSPOBJD. Simply do aFinally be sure to examine how the memory resources
DSPOBJD for all objects and all object types in allare allocated into the system memory pools. To take
libraries. One of the options is the output type, simplea look at the current usage of the memory pools
set that to dump the results into an outfile. This filecheck the Display System Status command
contains all of the object names along with the size ofDSPSYSSTS.
the objects.Display System Status shows all of the current
After running the command to display all objectmemory allocated for the machine, base, spool and
descriptions, which I recommend running in batch, isinteractive pools. There are also other values to help
simply whip up a quick and dirty Query/400 query ordetermine memory problems like a running tab of faults
run an SQL statement over the outfile you created.and waits. And if need be you can adjust the system
Sort this query by the object size field ODOBSZ andmemory pools manually by using the Work with
you now can see what objects are taking up all theSystem Status command WRKSYSSTS.
DASD space.However it is usually recommended to allow the AS
The one catch I don't like about this technique though is400 operating system to tune the memory
it does not display objects sized once they surpass aperformance of the system pools automatically by
certain size, requiring you to add together a couple ofsettings the performance adjustment system value
fields to get the actual size.QPFRADJ to adjust at IPL and automatically at regular
Next up on the list of system performance items is tointervals.
monitor the jobs using the Work with Active Jobs