The picture above just says it all, after the Friday before last I’d like to just give it all up and become a rock and roll singer – I know that I can’t because I’d starve, but that’s how I feel. I have been asked to look at some performance issues with some systems, I’d like to be able to tell you all a bit more than that but as I decided at the beginning of this blog not to say who it is that I work for I won’t. But so as you can have a lightweight overview of the systems, the systems have between them 118 power P6 CPU’s, 1.7Tb of Memory and 1.5Pb of disk. In terms of modern systems this is a lot of poke, but the applications loaded on these systems seem to be stressing them to the absolute limit. So how is that I hear you ask, well Java has this amazing ability – It knows how to use every available CPU cycle and then a bit more. Now you might not think that this is a big deal, well I can actually tell you that it is a big deal! When you have this amount of tin to play with and it can’t make ends meet, you know that the muppets have taken over.
Now having had a look at the performance metrics and investigated a little, I find that what seems to be fairly straight forward to someone who has 30+ years of experience setting these things up and maintaining them may not be quite as straight forward as I was told. But after all these are just Unix systems, so when you have a diagnostic tool that say’s that the config is wrong you’d expect to investigate the issue.
On reflection it would seem not, Just because things seem to be running like a dog – they may not actually be running like a dog. It depends on who you talk to after all, when you talk to someone who has a closed mind everything is OK. The problem must lie somewhere else it seems, that would be anywhere else other than the wonderful kit supplied by IBM at the moment. Still I’ll get to the bottom of this if I’m allocated to the task, failing that there will be an ongoing issue with the performance of the system till they bring in a specialist.
I have had a great time investigating the problem, one of the initial indicators is that the back end disk configuration was done by someone with the IT skill set of the great Gonzo. But I’ve been told that I don’t fully understand the problem, so I guess that I’ll just have to get to grips with the manuals and understand what they are telling me. Till that time the application will run like a dog, or if you want a killer application – it’s just that it kills the wrong things.