by Pam Manolakis
DENVER, COLORADO - Users of Model 204 and System 1032 were treated to a warm welcome in Denver for the well-attended IMPACT'97 conference (April 27-30). Increased attendance enabled conference attendees to discuss in detail Year 2000 concerns, as well as to explore the delivery of information via the Web!
CCA presented many sessions on both product lines. Of value to all attendees were sessions on the Year 2000, highlighting activities needed to meet the new millennium; also of interest was a look at the CCA intranet infrastructure and methods for making documents available on the Web.
For System 1032, CCA presented highlights of Version 9.7 and discussed Version 2.0 of the ODBC Driver. Sessions on exploring OpenVMS and System 1032 tools and utilities relating to application performance were well attended. A session focusing on the translation and implementation concepts necessary to access data access objects was also presented.
For Model 204, CCA covered the new features and functionality provided in V4R1 of Model 204 and Connect* V2.0. Sessions on Empower provided mechanisms for enhancing application front-ends along with new functionality. Another session discussed using the Remote Command Line feature of V4R1 to integrate the power of User Language with industry-standard client tools. And, as always, Jim Damon held forth with a new session entitled "The Jim Damon Performance Report."
The CCA Demo Center was highly trafficked by users viewing Empower, Connect*, System 1032 ODBC, Web access to CCA, Remote Command Line, and the new CCA Homepage.
Elections for president of IMPACT were held. Best wishes go to the newly elected president Eric Adler.
And finally, Computer Corporation of America would like to extend a very big thank you to Les Stewart for his past six years of service on the IMPACT Board. This last conference under his reign was, to quote many customers: "The best IMPACT ever!"
One of the highlights of the CCA demo room was the grand opening of CCA's enhanced Web site: www.cca-int.com. When demos were not in progress, the large-screen monitors showcased the Web site's welcome screen, with the CCA logo in vibrant blue.
Recently redesigned by Harpell/Martins & Company, the Web site offers information on CCA's products and services in a user-friendly format.
Jump to a new section highlighting Year 2000 information and consulting services.
And don't miss the new Customer Support section, with buttons to select the current CCAprint newsletter and archives, Education Services course listings and registration, and more. During May we will roll out support maintenance mechanisms to our users over the Internet. Watch for this!
System 1032 V9.7 was commercially released on April 27, 1997 and is now available. This newest release includes update trigger procedures, $ID retrieval added to record descriptors, and Year 2000 compliance.
Contact your CCA sales representative.
19-MAY-1997 is the date when certain date-time related applications will begin to give incorrect results, due to a delta-time limitation in OpenVMS. This limitation involves date durations greater than 9999 days.
A full description of the problem and its treatment is available on the OpenVMS Web site at:www.openvms.digital.com
The System 1032 demonstration Web server (written by the University of Ohio), which is a publicly available program that CCA redistributes as a demo, is affected by the limitation. However, System 1032 products are not affected by this delta-time limitation, and relinking System 1032 after you apply the patch is not required.
Use the S1032HELP tool in the S1032_IMAGE area to extract all internal System 1032 help text into an OpenVMS HLP-formatted text file. You can then easily convert the resulting file to HTML or PDF for Web viewing, or make it available on the PC as a Windows help file.
Note: The extraction process might take a little while, as the help text retrieval commands are dynamically built.
by Jim Damon
Before asking the questions here are a few facts about servers and server datasets:
If different server sizes are defined, say 100K, 200K, and 300K, and my LSERVER is 150K, which server do I get?
MODEL 204 uses a best-fit algorithm. You are assigned the first available server large enough to accommodate your LSERVER requirement. If all the 200K servers are busy but one of the 300K servers is available, you get that one. However, each server swap you incur transfers only LSERVER number of bytes.
How are server numbers assigned?
In order from 1 to NSERVS. Server 1 is sized according to the first SERVSIZE parameter or, if not specified, according to the calculated value of LSERVER. Server 2 is sized according to the second SERVSIZE parameter or, if not specified, assumes the size of the previous server allocated. This process continues until NSERVS-servers have been allocated. Server numbers do not change after initialization.
If multiple server datasets are allocated, say CCASERVR, CCASERV0, and CCASERV1, are they all used?
Yes. User slots are allocated on server datasets in round-robin fashion. In this case, user0 is allocated a slot on CCASERVR, user1 on CCASERV0, user2 on CCASERV1, user3 on CCASERVR, and so on. Each server dataset should be allocated on a different physical volume; to allow multiple server swaps in parallel, in real time. This provides maximum performance.
How many server datasets should I allocate?
Allocate at least NSERVS datasets to maximize the potential for parallel, real-time server swapping. Although Model 204 supports 101 server datasets, allocating multiple datasets is not advantageous unless they are all on different, physical volumes. Most system managers have difficulty finding more than 20-30 different volumes in the entire system, so the practical limit is probably somewhere around the number of volumes on your system.
How many servers (NSERVS) should I allocate?
Start with a ratio of about 1:8 = NSERVS:NUSERS. However, this starting point does not differentiate logged-in users or potentially logged-in users from active users. To find the right number of servers for a particular APSY, full-screen environment, increase NSERVS until either WTSV is less than 1.000 or the ratio (SVWR+SVRD)/SCREENS is less than 1.
Should I define different server sizes?
Today, unless you are tuning server availability for a critical application, or have a small percentage of applications with server requirements that are much larger than most, you do not gain much advantage by defining different server sizes.
Prior to V2.1.0, servers and buffers were allocated below the 16M line, and minimizing the virtual storage consumed by servers made sense - more was available for buffers. In V2.1.0, buffers were moved above-the-line giving servers more room, though they were still allocated below-the-line.
In V2.2.0, our exploitation of XA was completed and servers were allocated above-the-line, where, potentially, 2G of virtual storage is available. This removed the need to worry, in most cases, about using different server sizes to conserve virtual storage.
Now, if ten percent of applications need a 300K server and the rest can all run in 230K or less, it probably makes sense to allocate 10% of NSERVS at 300K and the rest at 230K. The labor investment required to tune, monitor and maintain a multiple-server-size environment is not worth the return.
Many users have adopted a single-server-size strategy without any negative performance effects. Because the unused portion of a server is paged out by the operating system and does not occupy real-page frames in central storage, most of the concern about the one-server-size-fits-all strategy goes away.
Interested in seeing System 1032 in the [national] press? Care for some free advertising for your company? Do you have an interesting application or system using System 1032? Contact Chris Ramsdale, Director of Marketing at CCA. He is on the lookout for System 1032 users who have interesting stories to tell about using System 1032 to further and maintain their business.
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