An application might be performing slowly for a variety
of reasons. You can use several of the tools included in i5/OS™
and other licensed programs to help you get more information.
Collecting information about an application's performance is quite
different from collecting information about system performance. Collecting
application information can be done only with certain performance applications
such as Performance Explorer, Performance Trace Data Visualizer (PTDV), and
iDoctor. Alternately, you can get an overview of application performance by
using the Job monitor to track individual server performance and Performance
Tools to track and analyze server jobs.
Note: Collecting an application's
performance data can significantly affect the performance of your system.
Before beginning the collection, make sure you have tried all other collection
options.
- Performance Explorer
- This tool helps find the causes of performance problems that cannot be
identified by using tools that do general performance monitoring. As your
computer environment grows both in size and in complexity, it is reasonable
for your performance analysis to gain in complexity as well. The performance
explorer addresses this growth in complexity by gathering data on complex
performance problems.
Performance explorer is designed for application developers
who are interested in understanding or improving the performance of their
programs. It is also useful for users who are knowledgeable in performance
management to help identify and isolate complex performance problems.
- Performance Trace Data Visualizer for iSeries™
(PTDV)
- This tool is a Java™ application that can be used for performance
analysis of applications running on iSeries.
PTDV works with the performance explorer function of i5/OS
to allow the analyst to view program flows and get details (such as CPU time,
current system time, number of cycles, and number of instructions) summarized
by trace, job, thread, and procedures. When visualizing Java application
traces, additional details such as the number and type of objects created,
as well as information about Java locking behavior, can be displayed.
There is also support for performance explorer events generated by the WebSphere® Application
Server. PTDV allows sorting of columns, exporting of data, and many levels
of data summarization.
- iDoctor for iSeries
- The PEX Analyzer function in iDoctor includes a software tool specifically
geared towards analyzing trace data to improve system and application performance.
This detailed analysis gives a low-level summary of disk operations, CPU utilization,
file-open operations, machine interface (MI) programs, wait states, disk space
consumption, and much more. The client component is an iSeries Navigator plugin
that allows a user to condense and display iSeries trace
data graphically.
- Start Performance Trace (STRPFRTRC) command
- i5/OS includes a command
to collect multi-programming and transaction data. This command collects the
data that STRPFRMON collected in previous releases. After running this command,
you can export the data to a database file with the Dump trace (DMPTRC) command.