Barton wrote:

"There were two redbooks this
year that looked at many performance issues.  If
anything, they were
productive in finding performance issues that needed
to be
addressed."

I'm not addressing "tuning", but rather taking issue
with the fact that there is very little recent
performance and capacity information. A lot of
measurements were done early, s/390z Linux was
categorized, then a series of assumptions have become
the mythology of Linux on zSeries. Since then, zSeries
has changed a lot.

One of things that happens when machines become faster
and bigger is that they enable more applications on
that platform. Until the G6, CMOS techonolgy was even
slower than the bipolar technology that it replace.
Now, the zSeries has caught up with and now exceeds
its previous capabilities spurred on by the
competition of intel and Unix processors. We need to
evaluate some of the assumptions we made early on (3
years ago!).

For example: August, 2003, share
http://www.linuxvm.org/present/index.html

Thoss's report on performance is about the lastest
there is: z900 z216, F20 shark, ESCON/FICON, gigabit
ethernet, 2.4.7 or 2.4.17 kernel, 31 bit.

Currently available to the customer:
z990, 800 shark, FICON, 2.4.21 kernel, hipersockets,
64 bit. (some of the test in Thoss's report were
memory constrained in a 31 bit environment).

Also,
- the redbooks emphasize overall VM tuninig with
really very little information about tuning Linux -
especially if you have to run in an LPAR
- a dearth of information on things like DB2,
websphere
- lots of reports on how zseries scaled up to an
"equivalent" intel, but not really very much of what
happens when zseries scales BEYOND intel (both in CPs
and I/O) - large transactions volumes and rates.

=====
Jim Sibley
Implementor of Linux on zSeries in the beautiful Silicon Valley

"Computer are useless.They can only give answers." Pablo Picasso

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