[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances
Richard Maher
maher_rjSPAMLESS at hotmail.com
Tue Apr 30 05:50:34 EDT 2019
On 28/04/2019 10:28 pm, IanD wrote:
> ACMS was good for lots of things but having to chase down a process
> or task death in the ACMS logs could get tedious. It also got hairy
> at times, especially if it crashed at a lower level and you then had
> to wade through swlup logs when ACMS didn't start for example
>
> I used to have to do a lot of work with dectrace to delve into ACMS
> tasks for performance issues. I enjoyed that a lot (not being
> sarcastic either)
>
> We ran with 7 vaxes as online nodes feeding two alpha gs1280 rdb
> database nodes. When everything was in a cluster using dectrace to
> span across ACMS and rdb, things were good.
>
> Eventually we split up the cluster because the vaxes slowed us down
> too much, after that, dectrace with ACMS and rdb became a lot more
> painful to debug.
>
> I've seen instances where a machine crashed inside an ACMS task and
> hp could not determine the cause even after we gave them full crash
> dumps. It seemed as though dectrace, ACMS and rdb knowledge back then
> was waning, especially when dectrace and rdb went to Oracle, the
> cross knowledge understanding went out the door
>
> The other pain was getting hold of the dectrace definitions for rdb.
> ACMS wasn't too bad from memory but the whole loading etc and having
> to stop the dectrace database was annoying. It was a while ago now,
> so my memory is patchy but exactly matching rdb and dectrace
> definitions was often a bit of an afterthought for dectrace it
> seemed
>
> I used to enjoy pulling apart an ACMS task and seeing where the
> bottlenecks were, then again, I've always loved statistics
>
> I used to plead with programmers to add dectrace calls in their code
> but it often feel on deaf ears. Dectrace can be very helpful .
> Thankfully ACMS and rdb have these added automatically and you can
> narrow down what part is the procedure call and task set up times and
> what not (I'm struggling to remember the components of an ACMS task
> in dectrace now *sigh")
>
> I even tried to use an rdb collection and feed it into rdbexpert. It
> did ok although the last collection I took exceeded something with
> rdbexpert and it crashed and even though I logged a ticket with hp,
> they basically didn't/couldn't do anything with the limitation and
> just told me to make my collections smaller. The volume of data
> collected was high so that really wasn't a workaround. I suspect this
> was around the time dectrace, rdb and rdbexpert might have been
> heading off for Oracle land? I don't exactly remember now
>
> I was always impressed with ACMS, rdb and dectrace as products and
> how they functioned together well
>
> It seemed to stem from a like minded design philosophy, unlike the
> modular crap on sees in systems and products today where it's
> blatantly obvious different teams design and write different parts.
> They often cannot even get a definition sentence consistent
>
Remember it well.
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