Re: Puzzling performance issue?

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 18:56:13 -0500, Andrew Hamm wrote: <SNIP> > NOAGE, if supported on a platform, tells the engine's CPUVP processes to hog > all the CPU time they desire. Therefore it's a disaster on a single CPU > machine, and needs to be handled carefully on multi-cpu machines, especially > dual. NOAGE is good 'cos, if you buy more CPU's specifically for the engine, > you can guarantee that it actually gets full use of them. <SNIP> Andrew, I'm going to take exception to your description of NOAGE and your subsequent recommendations to not set NOAGE in the ONCONFIG file. The NOAGE parameter tells the engine to notify the OS that it's runtime priority should not be downgraded over time as a "long-running-process". This parameter can be critical on OS's like Solaris and especially HPUX which agressively reduce a processes priority over time so that the longer a process is running the smaller its timeslice and the less frequently it is granted a timeslice. Since IDS's oninit processes (hopefully) remain in memory from system startup to system shutdown (barring maintenance restarts and <heaven forefend> crashes) this means that after a few days (faster on a system with fewer CPUS or more user processes) the engine will slow down SIGNIFICANTLY! On Solaris and more so on HPUX, and some other UNIX variants, having "NOAGE 1" in your ONCONFIG file is a REQUIREMENT. If you want to reduce the priority of the oninits by some fixed amount so that priority jobs can take precedence (we do that here) then lower the nice value of the initial oninit at start up. Art S. Kagel