Here is a list of the issues we have come across and their current status.

We would find the system would hang when doing fairly heavy processing. This
was caused by two memory management issues. Both issues have been resolved
and a general patch has been released. One patch resolves both.

Using Suprtool to create a self describing file we found the file end of
limit would be a negative number. This was caused by a file I/O error. This
too has been resolved and a general patch released.

There is an FCONTROL 2 and FCONTROL 6 that basically tells the system to
take the information in memory and write it too disk. What it's supposed to
do is take a block of records, write it to disk, then get the next block.
The problem is that the start for the block always goes back to the start.
Example, lets say there are 8 blocks of 100 records to be written. It takes
the first 100 records and writes them, then it takes the first 100 and the
second 100 and writes them, then it takes the first 100, the second 100 and
third 100 and writes them. By the time it gets down the first 100 has been
written 8 times. Currently being worked.

The forth an last issue deals with disk mirroring and number of spindles.
What happens is there is a PQUAD table, or table in PQUAD, or at least some
thing to that affect that is used my mirroring. The more spindles you have
and the more writes you have causes the use of this table to be increased to
its limit. If the limit is hit gracefully all that happens is mirrored
partners are lost. If the limit is not hit gracefully it will cause a system
abort with an Abort 1101. We currently have about 250 spindles and are
testing the patch now.

We have also had system halts when we installed 6.5 and increased our 997 to
12 processors from 8 and 16g of memory from 4g. The added processors and
memory were removed but 6.5 left on and the box is running our production
fine. HP has come up with different memory and processors and will attempt
the hardware upgrade this evening.

OK, That's all.

Rich Holloway
Systems Administrator
Providence Health Plans
Phone: (503) 574-7457
Fax: (503) 574-8614
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http://www.providence.org

The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my company. They belong
solely to me.

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. --
Mario Andretti