Is the time spent stealing pages charged to the user whose pages are being stolen? If not, what else can add to the TTIME of an otherwise idle user?
Let me set the stage. We are being required to FORCE DISCONNECT any user who has been idle more than x minutes (x still being debated). Trying to test the routine that does this, I logged on a general user and let it sit idle after falling through its PROFILE. It remained connected, so I could see that there were no messages being received that might be counted as TTIME. This user stayed connected for nearly an hour longer than the specified limit. In reviewing statistics gathered using ESAMON, there were several times during the period when the reported VMDTTIME was incremented, which in turn, caused the idle clock to be restarted. After several resets of the idle value, the user finally timed out and was disconnected. When ESAMON reports TTIME to the macro being used, it converts VMDTTIME to a decimal number rounded to 10000ths of a second, so these periodic increments were stepping in 10ths of milliseconds, not insignificant values for a z990. This happened fairly early in the morning. We do not observe anything like it when we reach our normal daytime load. That is what made me think that it may be page steals. The rationale is that the pages are stolen more quickly when the machine is loaded, so they are all stolen very early in the idle period, not causing a noticeable lengthening of it. With a light load, there is much less a reason to steal pages; therefore it takes a much longer period to steal all of the idle user's pages and they are stolen in small clumps at random times, accounting for the unevenness of the incrementing of TTIME. Regards, Richard Schuh
