AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

kpapenfuss

Active Member
Our company has 130 concurrent users. We are experiencing major performance issues. We are consistently running at 99.9+% cpu utilization. We have had JDE CNC people look at our configuration with a recommendation upgrading our AS/400. We currently have a 2-Way Model 830 with 12 gb of memory. We are considering upgrading to a 4-Way Model 830. Initially JDE told us that our original 2-Way was big enough. Does anyone with have any experience using a 2-Way AS/400 with the same amount of users? We are utilizing all OneWorld modules except Advanced Transportation, Payroll and HR.
 
We also have a 2 processor 830, with 7GB main memory. Not co-existent. Typically 250 concurrent users, but not many of them are heads down data entry types. CPU averages 30 to 35% in a working day. Our main bottleneck is disk arms.
What is your CPU actually doing - are you monitoring it with Management Central? Might it be an Interactive problem since you are co-existent? i.e. is CFINT hogging CPU? (Not a problem for us since we are not co-existent).
 
We were in exactly the same situation six months ago.
We had an AS400 830 2way and performance was dreadful,
we tried everything,eventually, we upgraded to a 4 way and performance improved dramatically.Our original sizing was for a 4 way 730,but we decided to wait for the 8xx machines to arrive,and we too were told that a 2 way 830 was sufficient,when evidently it was not.
We have approx 120 users.

XE AS400 830 SP 18.1 coexistent citrix TSE
 
Our CFINT doesn't appear to be a bottleneck. It usually consumes about 5% of the CPU at most. We enter about 300 sales orders with an average of 15 lines per order. We print acknowledgements and pick slips through out the day. We met with our AS/400 distributor and he says there are many JDE OneWorld customers with greater loads than us with the same box (2400/1531). We also have users using ShowCase, Kronos and Vertex. What am I missing?
 
Keith,

Are you capturing performance data? Have you looked at the Advisor? Where are you in Dasd utilization? The advisor can give you some insights as to where the contention might be.

Darrell Allison
Systems Programmer
AS/400 V4R5 9406-730 8-Way / OneWorld B7332 SP11.3
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

We use a monitoring tool called Performance Navigator. As far as DASD utilization we are at about 70% of our overall disk space. One of the biggest issues we have is the amount of CPU consumed by UBE's. We have about 4 (sometimes up to 7)UBE's running concurrently most of the time, each using 10 to 30% of our CPU. Do other companies run multiple UBE's concurrently throughout peak business hours?
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

I have a client with a similar issue, and a similar machine.

To overcome it we have added a Windows 2000 batch server to offload most of the batch processing away from the main machine. This is because at peak times most of CPU was being used by finance UBEs that were not so time critical. At other times with no UBEs running it was fine.

This is much cheaper option than upgrading the AS400, and can be tried using a temporary server to see how you get on.
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

One reason we can support 250 clients on a 2 processor 830 is that most of our heavy users tend to run UBE's locally (they are on thick clients). We'd probably struggle also if everything ran on the 830. Another thought, following up on Paul Clark's email, is that you could have a smaller iSeries as an application server, say an 810. This would avoid maintaining server code for 2 platforms. We're thinking about combining applications server and JAS on an 810.
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

Keith,

I regularly ran 20 UBE's simultaneously on my 830 4-way. To make it work well you really need someone who understands work management on the AS/400.

I now run 20 UBE's simultaneously on my 840, with 3 south american countries going live in 30 days, I will probably be running 25-30.

The first thing I would do is to change the class that the UBE batch job runs under to have a timeslice of 750-1000. What this does is forces the job to give up the CPU every 750-1000 MS. Out of the box the timeslice is 5000MS (5 seconds). JDE's UBE's take hold of a processor and don't let go. (If anyone following this thread know how JDE does this please contact me privately. I have been coding on the machine since 83 and have no idea how to do this) This means that all CPU's are monopolized for on average 1.25 seconds.

Second, I would give all the memory you can to the UBE subsystem do reduce paging. Since the UBE's refuse to give up the CPU on a bring, you want to have as few of them as possible.

I am hoping to have a BOF at Focus on AS/400 performance tuning. If it can go, I'll share the gorey details of what we've done.

Tom Davidson
 
RE: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

Thanks Tom. We currently have our timeslices set to 2000. We are going to
set them to 1000 to see the impact.



Keith Papenfuss
The Vollrath Co., LLC
Xe, SP 20_Q1, Coexistent, AS/400, W2K, Citrix XP
 
We had you same problem. If I didn't know better I would have thought I wrote it. Anyway We just upgraded our 830 2-way - 2400 to and 830- 4 way 2402. We have 14G memory which did not change with the upgrade and our performance also has DRAMATICALLY increased. We are heavy on UBE's also and that was killing customer servece. Now customer serveice is acceptable and UBE's are flying through the machine. Our next step in the next couple of months is to upgrade to a 830 4-way 2349 which will give us server on demand to take it up to an 8 way as we grow.
 
CFINT may actually be your problem. The CPW rating of your box (which is identical to ours) is 1850 batch/70 interactive. The interactive part will KILL performance if it goes too high (and 5% is way too high) because it acts as a governor on the machine -- when interactive goes up, batch goes down dramatically. We have about 200 users on our 830/2400 and although we sometimes experience performance issues, we never reach 99% CPU during the course of a normal day (normal being the operative word).

You can also experience severe performance issues if 1) your DASD exceed 70% full; 2) your disk arms exceed 15% utilization. We gained some improvement in performance by adding 10k RPM drives, and we're in the process of adding 4GB additional memory and more 10k drives. We are using transportation but not HR or payroll.
 
You're adding 4GB of memory - how much do you have at the moment? How did you decide on the 4GB (as opposed to none, or 2GB etc)?

Thanks,
 
The amount of memory will double our current 4GB -- the system was originally sized with only 2GB, but the sizing didn't take into account how we use the system, namely it didn't include transportation (a big resource hog). We recently had an analysis done by our vendor, using Performance Navigator from Midrange Computing Group. MCG analyzed the performance info and our vendor made some pretty graphs with it. We were seeing a lot of non-DB page faults above the generally accepted level, and determined that memory would help to resolve that problem. We're also planning to do *HSM balancing on our DASD after we install the new drives (see the help for STRASPBAL "Start ASP Balance"). *HSM will put the most used data on the faster devices, those being the 10k drives on our system.
 
We had the same issue last year with a 2-way 820. IBM/JDE had sized it in 2000 but their sizing was not very mature then especially with no benchmarks for transportation, advanced pricing and warehousing. We had our requirements run back thru the resizing and they suggested a 4-way with 10gb. We upgraded to a 8-way on demand model of 830 with 4 turn on. The world changed. Our CPU % stays normally at 20-30 and user UBE's don't bring us to our knees. Financial UBE's are the worst. 2 processors are just not enough to do all that need to be done on a AS400 with JDE running and still have the power to run UBE's at will. If we there were no UBE's a 2-way system would work.
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

We are looking at setting up a batch server to run all UBEs. How did you determine which UBEs run on the batch server as opposed to the 400? How does this affect package builds, deployments, etc? Is this a difficult process to implement?

Thanks,
Holly Erb
CNC
J. R. Simplot Co.
 
Re: RE: AS/400 Model 830 w/2 processers

Holly, there is a case study titled "Considerations for Mixing NT and AS/400 UBEs" on the KG. It should answer the majority of your questions.

Good Luck,

Ryan Hunt
 
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