Adam asked me to post something about mainframe load—“what’s the biggest source of load, what’s next, where’s broker, ADABAS, etc.” Let me start by showing a ten second snapshot I just took (2:10 pm) of CPU usage by job:

CPU BUSY   94%    10 SEC SAMPLE      4 CPUS ACTIVE

JES  UTCOM7      26% OF CPU BUSY    E8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTPRD2      11% OF CPU BUSY    EA  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTPRD1       5% OF CPU BUSY    EA  <-- PRIORITY
STC  UTETB1       4% OF CPU BUSY    EE  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTQUA1       4% OF CPU BUSY    DC  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTCOM4       4% OF CPU BUSY    E8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTPRD5       4% OF CPU BUSY    EA  <-- PRIORITY
STC  UTNDVT       3% OF CPU BUSY    F4  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTCOM2       3% OF CPU BUSY    E8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTQUA5       3% OF CPU BUSY    DC  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTCOM8       2% OF CPU BUSY    E8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  SGNWFL9D     2% OF CPU BUSY    C0  <-- PRIORITY
JES  EWNWEOMO     2% OF CPU BUSY    C1  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTCOM1       1% OF CPU BUSY    E8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTQUA4       1% OF CPU BUSY    DC  <-- PRIORITY
JES  UTPRD4       1% OF CPU BUSY    EA  <-- PRIORITY
JES  NRNW2041     1% OF CPU BUSY    C8  <-- PRIORITY
JES  EINWAEVE     1% OF CPU BUSY    C0  <-- PRIORITY

This is fairly typical of what we’ve been seeing this week. UTCOMx jobs are the COM-PLETEs; UTCOM7 is where most production Broker servers run, UTCOM2 is “Fiscal”, etc. They typically represent about a quarter to a third of the CPU being used during prime shift. UTPRDx jobs are the production Adabas databases, and they typically take up a fifth to a quarter of the CPU usage. UTQUAx are the quality assurance Adabas databases; their usage is highly variable. (Test Adabas databases are named UTTSTx; none of them was using enough CPU to show up when I took this snapshot.)

UTETBx jobs are Broker; UTETB1 is the production Broker nucleus. This is where the big difference has been during this semester’s registration: before I installed EntireX version 8 over the summer, Broker used about the same amount of CPU as COM-PLETE, but once I installed the new version, it dropped down to between a fourth and a sixth of that. If we were still at version 7 of Broker, it would have been taking up between 20 and 25% of the CPU, instead of around 5%.

I’ll also draw your attention to the priorities. (Those are hexadecimal numbers, by the way.) Broker has the highest priority, with production Adabas next and COM-PLETE next. Batch jobs are at the very bottom. The MVS dispatcher always selects the highest priority job that’s ready to use the CPU. If Broker were still using 20% or so of the CPU, the QUAL databases and the batch jobs would just be out of luck—they’d still be running, but they would never get a chance to use the CPU.

I’ll watch for any questions in the comments, or you can email me and I’ll post the answers.