I mentioned having modified a QSAM program to write 'large blocks' by replacing 
DCB with DCBE. My goal was to test the effect of very large blocks in our new 
tape subsystem, which we had learned was highly biased in favor of large 
blocks. This had nothing to do with AMODE, which was all 31. The program 
certainly ran faster with large blocks such as 260K. I could not distinguish 
improvement at the IOS level (lower I/O count) vs. improvement at the tape 
level. Most likely a combination. 

My problem with the new tape was that the vendor seemed to assume that a 
customer could just tweak JCL to create giant blocks. In fact many of our 
largest tape files are created by utilities--IBM or otherwise--that are not 
written for large blocks. In practice you can code as large a block size as you 
wish, but if the program contains only DCBs, any size greater than 32K is 
simply ignored without error. While the change to DCBE was very simple, it has 
to be accomplished by the program owner.

.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
323-715-0595 Mobile
626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW
[email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of Elardus Engelbrecht
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 9:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: (External):Re: 31 vs 24 QSAM

Joseph Reichman wrote:

>I'm going to run it again tomorrow
>Just to double check

With varying LRECL, BLKSIZE and quantity of records/blocks. If you can, of 
course.

Also read a block, read it again, write and write it again. I'm sure you will 
get 'interesting' numbers.

Good luck. If you do that properly, that testing should be a good Red-Book 
article.

Groete / Greetings
Elardus Engelbrecht


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