Micks' Musings

Now for a topic with a possible audience of zero (which is probably the number - besides spambots - who read this blog!). Over the last few weeks I have been investigating the performance of our application on z/OS. The application is written in C and runs in batch and CICS. A customer reported that our latest version was not performing as well as the version they were currently running. Testing showed there was a difference. The same tests did not show a difference on other platforms. z/OS has unique characteristics, not surprising given the hardware it runs on, and there are bound to be factors that affect performance that do not affect other platforms. We build our application using unix system services and link the final modules into a Dataset (load library). What this means is that we can use standard unix shell utilities, make files and other tools just like on any other unix platform. This makes development much easier. The final link is the first time anything leaves the unix e