Gary Clarke <[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
 
>Over the past few weeks we have begun to experience severe 'hangs' on
>one of our production systems. Investigation has shown that dbputs to
>a detail set may be the culprit. Normally, updates are performed
>immediately but now the delay can be from 1 minute to 10 minutes.
>During this time glancexl shows the process to be using a lot of disk
>i/o (but there is no unusual physical disk activity). Other processess
>attempting to write to this dataset are IMPeded (there is item level
>locking on all processes).
>
>The detail set contains 2.9 million records (cap: 3.6 mill). There are
>two search items, the first is to an automatic containing 5.0 million
>records (cap: 5.6 mill), the second is to a manual containing 8,519
>records (cap: 11411).
 
<snip>
 
The first thing I'd do is get a HOWMESSY (or some similar report) of the
database and look at the distribution of the master entries and the
percentage of secondaries.
 
Also, what are the data types of the masters?  And what kind of data values
do they contain.
 
BTW, I know of several reason why a 3,000,000 entry detail might have a
5,000,000 automatic master; which reasons apply in this case?
 
 -- Evan