Dawn May
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Guru: Maximum Number Of Jobs And Job Table Warning Customization
March 23, 2020 Dawn May
The QMAXJOB system value specifies the maximum number of jobs that can exist on your IBM i partition. The default value is 163,520, with the valid range being 32,000 through 970,000. If you reach the maximum number of jobs as defined by this system value, very bad things can happen to your system. You can always sign on to the console as the system reserves one job table entry for the console, but if you hit the limit on the maximum number of jobs, you will not be able to start any new jobs. In the worst case, it will …
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Guru: Move Objects with Access Client Solutions
October 14, 2019 Dawn May
Sending objects from one IBM i partition to another is a common task. Access Client Solutions’ IFS task makes it simple to copy or send objects. The IFS task was introduced in ACS in July 2016, so this is not a new development, but it may not be widely known.
Perhaps you need to send a save file to another IBM i partition. There are several ways to do this. FTP and Secure FTP are often used, but using FTP to transfer IBM i objects involves all sorts of complications. The IBM i Knowledge Center dedicates an entire section on …
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Guru: Application Tracing With The QTRC APIs
May 20, 2019 Dawn May
The IBM i operating system is extensively instrumented for diagnostic purposes to help IBM resolve issues should they arise. Instrumenting your application for diagnostics is also possible in a manner very similar to what IBM has done in the operating system.
STRTRC and the QTRC APIs
The operating system includes a trace facility called QTRC. This trace facility is a set of APIs (QTRC APIs) that allow you to instrument your application to collect trace data. This trace data can be whatever you may find helpful for debugging applications in a production environment, where using a debugger is …
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Guru: Find The Needle In The Haystack With Watches
February 25, 2019 Dawn May
IBM i does a great job of logging information using messages. Messages are sent to message queues, the history log, as well as the job log. IBM i job logs can be very useful for identifying and resolving application issues. No other system has such a great logging facility for reviewing what happened in a job.
What if you need to debug an intermittent application problem? What if the symptom is a message logged to the job log? And what if there are hundreds of jobs where this message could be sent? There are a variety of ways you can …
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Why You Should Join A Local User Group?
February 4, 2019 Dawn May
Here’s a good question: Why should you want to join a local user group?
You can communicate with colleagues via email or instant messages. A wide array of social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, provide a way to share information. Internet searches allow you to find documentation and articles. While the interconnected world provides access to large amounts of information, you also have to determine if the information you find is accurate. Of course, you can trust information from IBM web sites, but what about posts on social media? Are they always right? I’m sure you’ve heard …
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Guru: Health Indicators
January 28, 2019 Dawn May
In Configure Collection Services, I reviewed how you can improve the configuration of Collection Services. In this tip, I’m going to demonstrate how to easily review your Collection Services data and understand your partition’s performance characteristics using the Health Indicators.
Navigator for i has a rich set of performance tasks, one of which is Investigate Data, also referred to as the Performance Data Investigator (PDI). The base operating system allows you to manage and visualize Collection Services data. The Performance tasks (and PDI) also support other types of performance data, but those graphical features require installing the Performance Tools …
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Guru: Configure Collection Services
November 12, 2018 Dawn May
Collection Services collects valuable information about your partition and the workloads you are running. While many think of Collection Services as performance data, it is really systems management data and at some point you will need that data. Collection Services helps you understand the overall workload running on your system and trends over time. It provides the ability to look backwards in time to understand “How did I get here?” and has the data to answer a wide variety of other questions.
Collection Services is on by default, so whether you know it or not, you are running Collection Services. …
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