Not true! The TUNE settings were revamped when MPE/XL came along, and again when the dispatcher was tweaked at about release 2.0. I also disagree with your contention that the default settings are "about as bad as they can be". An expert can often adjust them for certain situations for a positive effect, but of settings that work in the widest variety of situations you can't do better. -----Original Message----- From: RJ Keefer [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 11:40 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: To decay or not to decay - that is the question..... I beg to differ. The default settings were developed in 1973 on the Series II and have never been changed. they were okay on that machine. They were designed for a machine that was terribly I/O bound and constantly waiting for data from disk. The machines today and rarely, if ever, I/O bound. They are almost always CPU or Memory starved. The default TUNE settings are about as bad as they can be for today's machines. Randy Keefer On Fri, 9 Mar 2001 11:17:04 -0800, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >Paul writes: >> We currently have out job queues set to decay but are considering >> modifying some/all to oscillate. > >If you have a string on a violin (or similar instrument) which is properly >tuned, then there are an infinite number of adjustments you can make, none >of which will be an improvement. > >Even if your string is determined to be out of tune, you may be stuck with >the fact that the rest of the orchestra has "tuned up" to match your >out-of-tune string, so "fixing" it may simply introduce a more troublesome >dissonance between the parts of the whole, and it may be better to stick >with what you have. > >By all means play with the :TUNE command if you like, but keep in mind that >the default settings are what MPE is developed and tested against, and the >same is probably true for most applications that run on MPE. > >More than once have we solved all of a customers horrible performance >problems by doing nothing more than putting the :TUNE parameters back to >their defaults. > >Science tells us that there's no point in even speculating about things >which we cannot measure, and playing with the :TUNE command is difficult >because it is so very hard (in most cases) to determine just *what* the >results of a change are. Unless you can scientifically measure the effects >of each tweak with valid reproducible experiments, it's easy to convince >yourself that you've made things better when in fact they have actually >gotten worse overall. > >G.