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Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …
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Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …
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Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …
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Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …
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New Nav Puts SQL Services Within Reach

September 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM delivered new Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last week, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Arguably one of the biggest announcements is the overhaul of IBM i Navigator, which the folks at IBM have taken to calling “New Nav.” But what makes New Nav so special?

IBM rewrote New Nav from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building Web and mobile applications, and PrimeNG, a popular component library for Angular. The combination of these two technologies gives New Nav a fresh-looking interface that will appeal to users of all …
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Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 2

June 28, 2021 Dawn May

This is the second in a two-part series on how you can use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) to investigate performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is more commonly known than PDI, using both tools is a good way to analyze database performance.

In Part 1, I reviewed the Database content package, focusing on the charts for I/O reads and writes, SQL CPU utilization, and database locks. In this tech tip, I continue by reviewing the charts related to SQL Cursor and Native DB Opens as well as the SQL Performance …
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Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

June 21, 2021 Dawn May

This is a two-part series on how to use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) for investigating performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is the tool of choice for Db2 performance analysis, there is valuable information that you can get from using PDI. PDI is often a useful starting point to help guide you in the correct direction when trying to identify performance issues. In my experience, PDI is under-utilized for Db2 investigation. For those not familiar with PDI, you may want to read the article, Getting Started with the Performance Data Investigator …
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The Ultimate Set Of Tools

December 14, 2020 Rob McNelly

Those of a certain age will certainly remember the moment in Fast Times At Ridgemont High when Jeff Spicoli got himself into a bind after he wrecked his friend’s car. Luckily, Spicoli’s dad was a TV repairman, and he had an ultimate set of tools. Spicoli knew that with those tools, he could fix it. That level of confidence is intoxicating, although in this case it was possibly misplaced.

I have a friend that lives around the corner from me that actually does have the ultimate set of tools, and knows how to use them. For example, he recently rebuilt …
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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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