Monday 20 February 2012

CSE and Separate Database Machines

Over the years a number of CSE sites have tried to place the CSE database and software on separate physical servers. Technically there is no issue with making this function correctly, but what we have seen is that the additional network traffic required slows down the overall performance and response times of the software considerably, the point where it outweighs the benefits of spreading the CPU load. This is especially noticeable for servers that have huge amounts of memory, where large portions of the database are available in cache, and therefore the network response becomes a larger percentage of the overall transaction since disk i/o is less of a bottleneck.

Where customers have utilised this approach, it has been necessary to implement complex and expensive dedicated network pipes between the servers, and frankly is not worth it just to spread the load, where actually a single powerful server is perfectly capable of serving the needs of the entire Gen development team.
We therefore strongly recommend that the database and software reside on the same machine.

Friday 17 February 2012

z/OS Operations Libraries and Dynamic Linking

Gen r8 introduced a new feature to package action blocks into z/OS Operations Libraries (z/LIB). These are DLLs that contain one or more action blocks and are similar in concept to the operations libraries that have been available in Gen for the Windows and UNIX environments for some time.

One difference between Windows/UNIX and z/OS relates to the use of the MVS Dynamic Linking property of an action block (or business system default). To be eligible for packaging into a z/LIB, the action block must be marked as dynamic (not static or compatibility).

You should be careful when converting from purely dynamic action blocks to z/LIBs. If you only package the top level action blocks into the z/LIB, the lower level action blocks will be called dynamically from a separate load module if they remain dynamic and are not packaged into the z/LIB.

Consider the following example: AB1 calls AB2 and both are marked as dynamic, either as a business system default or explicitly.

If you create a z/LIB and only add AB1 into the z/LIB, since AB2 is private to AB1, then the z/LIB will only contain AB1 and AB2 remains an 'old style' dynamic action block with its own load module and the call from AB1 to AB2 is dynamic.

If AB2 is private, it should either be changed to static so that it is only statically linked into the z/LIB, or added to the scope of z/LIB so that it is also linked into the z/LIB.