I know a little something about ABO (and a little less than that about COBOL V5 Optimisation) and I agree with your comments. They make perfect sense (and no I've not been involved in this situation).
I recently cautioned an account team to guide their customer thus. I think it's fine to share with y'all... Take a CICS region that talks to DB2 (and we can detect this connection from SMF 30). Suppose it's 1 engine's worth (and no this is not a discussion about QR TCB limitations). We don't know from SMF 30 how much of that path length is "in COBOL" and how much is "in SQL". ABO won't fix the latter. It might fix the former. I hazard as a "play number" that for a typical CICS transaction it might be 80% in SQL and 20% in COBOL (really application code). So, in that case, ABO only attacks 20% of the txn's CPU. SQL tuning etc does the rest. Now, I think we can get much more forensic about this putative 80/20 split: In DB2 Accounting Trace we see Class 2 (and Class 7) CPU and also Class 1 CPU. Class 2 is "in SQL"; Class 1 includes that plus more CPU. So I think you have to subtract Class 2 CPU from any "region CPU" estimate you have. This ought to firm up the 80/20 which might easily be 50/50 or 20/80. And then you have a reasonable estimate of the "ABO target". You then have to guess how much of that target CPU is saved with ABO. Or try it. The above said "CICS". It might just as well have said "Batch", of course. For what it's worth a little more "comp sci" explanation of the kinds of optimisations wouldn't go amiss. But the developers might consider that competitive information. I wouldn't know. But I'm genuinely pleased ABO was released and think it will be really helpful for quite a few customers. The above is intended to be helpful in customers assessing the value. Perhaps I threw away the chance with the above for a blog post (but I can still reuse it) and it has the makings of a presentation slide in my (accepted on the agenda in Munich) "He Picks On CICS". Cheers, Martin Martin Packer, zChampion, Principal Systems Investigator, Worldwide Cloud & Systems Performance, IBM +44-7802-245-584 email: [email protected] Twitter / Facebook IDs: MartinPacker Blog: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/MartinPacker Podcast Series (With Marna Walle): https://developer.ibm.com/tv/category/mpt/ From: Jesse 1 Robinson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: 08/04/2016 20:51 Subject: Re: Automatic Binary Optimizer (ABO) Sent by: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> I never got any response to this question, so I thought I would contribute something. I got lots of help from the List writing my own COBOL program to make a preliminary foray into optimization ("COBOL Rookie Problem"). I got that program working but did not see much improvement with ABO. It does tons of I/O, which I'm told is not where ABO shines. So I tried the prime number calculator contributed by David Jousma. It also did not show much improvement, but ABO development pointed out that it actually does a lot of I/O by DISPLAYing each prime number found. 240,577 to be exact. So they replaced the individual DISPLAYs with a single DISPLAY at the end: "PRIME-COUNT 00240577". With that change, ABO showed a substantial improvement in the neighborhood of 27% reduction in CPU time vs. the vanilla version compiled with COBOL 4.2. The real question is how closely this program resembles a real life application program here. Doing only one I/O is pretty extreme, but the ratio of pure computation to I/O may be high enough to show improvement overall. I'm now waiting for availability of application programmers to pursue this further. . . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-302-7535 Office [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jesse 1 Robinson Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2016 11:10 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Automatic Binary Optimizer (ABO) Thought I would share an early experience with ABO. We are pursuing a 'free trial' arranged by one of our IBM reps. (Yes, we still have them.) We are at z/OS 2.1, but the trial is also available for 2.2. I installed ABO its own CSI, figuring that we could move forward discreetly without impacting the mainstream maintenance process. However, one PTF has an ACTION HOLD that mandates installation of one z/OS and three LE PTFs. Quoted below. This is a bigger deal than I anticipated because it requires popping my head out of the prairie dog hole. These are pretty new PTFs. A very recent download of 'recommended' maintenance did not include them. Just a heads-up if you're thinking of pursuing the ABO trial. "++ HOLD(UI35271) SYS FMID(HALI110) REASON(ACTION) DATE(16042) COMMENT (Using this new feature on z/OS 2.2 requires z/OS APAR OA47689, LE APARs PI52354, PI51546, and PI51802 be applied on the system where the optimizer is used, as well as the system where the optimized binaries are run. Using this new feature on z/OS 2.1 requires z/OS APAR OA49419, LE APARs PI55281, PI54804, and PI55010 be applied on the system where the optimizer is used, as well as the system where the optimized binaries are run.)." . . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-302-7535 Office [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jesse 1 Robinson Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2016 11:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Automatic Binary Optimizer (ABO) We are exploring ABO. This product alters the execution of pre-V5 COBOL modules in order to introduce-on the fly-some of the new efficiencies of V5 without having to recompile. Has anyone on the List tried it out? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. 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