Websphere MQ Performance

Over the last couple of years, Longpela Expertise have been involved in some IBM MQ projects. Most of this work has been capacity and performance, but we've also been involved in a large MQ upgrade project.

So in this issue, we thought we'd share some of our experiences from these projects. In our management article, we talk about a MQ/CICS performance project where the normal response time 'goalposts' did not apply, and what we did about it.

In our first technical article we follow on from this, and talk about some of the MQ SMF data that we've used and how.

Finally, in our second technical article, we talk about our first 'contact' with continuous delivery, and our thoughts about it.

We hope you enjoy this issue.

management: A Different Set of Goalposts for Application MQ Performance

When you've been working with mainframes as long as I have, you'll have spent a lot of time working on application performance: tuning applications so they work as fast as necessary. However recently I've been working on an application using MQ. And I've found that tuning applications and MQ can be a little different to the tuning I've been used to. Let me explain.

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technical: Practical Uses for MQ SMF Data

Those of lucky enough to work on z/OS have some advantages when it comes to monitoring IBM MQ: SMF. Forget reading queues with monitoring events, or 'sampling' information at set intervals. MQ on z/OS saves it all on SMF - if you set it up right.

Now, there is a lot of information about how to setup these records and obtain the data. But what can you do with this data? In this article, we'll take a look at some ways we've used this data in the past.

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technical: Is Continuous Delivery a Good Idea?

As a consultant, most of my project involve investigating problems or issues, fixing difficult problems, or providing other advice. However last year I was on a project to upgrade a client's Websphere MQ version (well, IBM MQ as it's called today). This was a nice change, going back to refresh my knowledge of problems or issues in upgrading software. And many of the issues are still the same: SMP/E installations, PSP buckets, change management, phasing in the new software.

However there was one choice to be made that surprised me: continuous delivery. Did I want to implement continuous delivery?

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