What release of OS/390 are you on? If it's an older release without TCP
having been incorporated into the USS, then you will see a lot of
get/freemains. I had an issue that I actually got to talk to a developer
about and we had a nice discussion about lots of things. One of them being
where TSM can use the BPX socket calls instead of the standard TCP socket
calls. He said that the conversion under the covers from the TCP socket
calls to the BPX calls and back again was a BIG overhead. He said you could
see 40% or more of CPU reduction moving to native BPX. He said you probably
wouldn't see much throughput difference unless you were moving to the new
Gigabit OSA cards.

We have a TSM server running on  an LPAR on a 9672-R44 with OSA-2 Fast
Ethernet cards. The disk is IBM ESS with 8 CHPID's to each, but the Magstar
3590B's are a bottle neck, too. Actually, I think ESCON is a bottleneck at
only 15MB/sec. I see about a 10-12GB/hour backup throughput via the OSA-2's.
I see about 25GB/hour tape throughput. CPU during the backup window runs
high, but this is running on a test/dev LPAR so that's not much of an issue.

I would like to get off this platform because of the tape throughput issues.
We're starting to backup more data than I can process for COPYPOOLing in the
available time before the next backup window occurs. The TSM DB is 18GB at
about 70%. That backup takes almost an hour. Because of the amount of time
to backup and restore the TSM DB, we are thinking of a different approach.
Since we have an ESS and Flashcopy, we are concidering bring TSM down at the
point where we normally do the BACKUP DB and then using Flashcopy to create
full disk copies of the volumes where the DBVOLUMES reside. Then bring TSM
back up. With Flashcopy, this process should only take about 2-minutes. Then
the flashcopy volumes would be backed up to tape with DFDSS and sent
offsite.

Bill Boyer
DSS, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
Christo Heuer
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 5:55 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: People running OS/390 TSM servers - maybe for the development
guys......


Hi all,

OK - For those of you that does not know anything about
OS/390 or don't run TSM servers on OS/390 this might be
very boring and maybe a bit cryptic - ignore or just
read for the fun.
Now for the people that still run OS/390 TSM servers:

I have always had my doubts about the scalability of
OS/390 when it comes to a TSM server.
Some of you might have seen me posting last year and early
this year about the size of your TSM environment and if
you are happy with the performance of TSM on OS/390 - only
one guy answered giving me specs on the environment they
run(Thanks to William Colwell), but other than that
most people said they moved off OS/390 and are now
running AIX or Sun or even Win2K servers.
William described their environment as an 80 Mips
processor box and a 166Gig db 88% used - and on top
of all that he has good performance from this.

Our environment is a 38 Gig db 80% used and we have
crappy performance. Now in Adsm V3 a new parameter
was introduced called MPTHREADING YES or NO. What
this does is tell TSM that it can start multiple
TCB's on multiple CP's - if you have multiple CP's
on your box.
Now we enabled this and noticed that TSM gets its
knickers in a knot when there are too many things
happening and the system is CPU constrained. In
WLM it is guarenteed to get CPU and in WDM you can
see that about 30% of the time it is delayed for
CPU. What we have done now in Omegamon is to check
how many work each of the TCB's does and then try
and figure out why TSM would perform crappy even though
it is getting about 50% of the total box.
Now - here comes the part where development might
be able to shed some light:

The TCB called dsmserv (the server task), has a
lmod caled IEANUC01 that has a CSECT of IGVGPVT
that uses about 90-95% of all the CPU cycles - remember
that this is one TCB assigned to one CP.
On further investigation our IBM'er came back and said
this IGVGPVT part controls getmain/freemain's for TSM.
Now here comes the question:
How can TSM be using 90% of a CP by just doing getmain/freemain
and all the other TCB's that has a CP allocated just sit
and wait for getmain/freemain's. This looks like a
serious scalability issue with TSM on a multiple
CP environment. According to our performance and MVS
guys the only way we are going to squeeze more juice
out of our OS/390 system with TSM is to split the
workload of TSM and run two TSM servers on one LPAR
or upgrade each CP to a more powerfull CP.
Is this in line with development, and the way it should work?

Thanks
Christo Heuer
ASBA Bank
Johannesburg
SOUTH AFRICA
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