Supporting On Demand Business Applications with the IBM Problem Determination Tools (APA, DT, DT with Advanced Facilities, FA, File Export, FM, WS)

12 Supporting On Demand Business Applications with the IBM Problem Determination Tools

During application maintenance

It is a fact of modern development that the person who maintains a given application is not

necessarily the person who wrote it. It is also true that the performance characteristics of an

application can change during its service lifetime.

A profiler such as Application Performance Analyzer can help stop the performance loss that

often occurs during maintenance. An application programmer can use this tool to determine

where the hot spots or heavy loops are in the application. The information about where the

performance bottleneck is located can then be taken into consideration when putting in a fix.

For example, the developer could learn where the heavy loop is, and then do whatever is

possible to avoid adding code to that loop when fixing the problem.

Application Performance Analyzer could also be used after a tentative fix is made that seems

to degrade performance, to help find the cause of that degradation.

Other uses

These are some other uses for Application Performance Analyzer:

򐂰 To provide information to a software provider when you run into a performance problem

with their code

򐂰 To help system programmers determine what parts of a given application are causing a

system performance problem

2.1.2 What Application Performance Analyzer can do

Application Performance Analyzer is a performance measurement and analysis tool that:

򐂰 Optimizes the performance of existing application resources

򐂰 Provides maximum flexibility, with support for CICS, Assembler, COBOL, PL/I, DB2, IMS,

and Web Sphere MQ technologies

򐂰 Eliminates excessive I/O activity and CPU time to increase response times

򐂰 Improves response time of online transactions and batch turnaround times

򐂰 Identifies code bottlenecks during initial testing and isolates performance problems in

existing applications

Application Performance Analyzer collects samples from the monitored address space and

analyzes the system or resource application in the following categories:

򐂰 An at-a-glance summary of various aspects of the measurement data to help you to

choose (using

hot spot) which other reports to concentrate on

򐂰 Total address space utilization of all modules in the address space

򐂰 CSECT utilization within each load module

򐂰 Instruction or statement utilization within each CSECT

򐂰 Assembler, COBOL, and PL/I statement usage within each module.

򐂰 Direct access storage device (DASD statistics)

򐂰 Coupling facility usage during the observation session

򐂰 Processor usage