Article
· Apr 1, 2016 2m read

InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – how to update pButtons.

#Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS

Previously I showed you how to run pButtons to start collecting performance metrics that we are looking at in this series of posts.

Update: May 2020.

Since this post was written several years ago, we have moved from Caché to IRIS. See the comments for an updated link to the documentation for pButtons (Caché) and SystemPerformance (IRIS). Also, a note on how to update your systems to the latest versions of the performance tools.

pButtons is compatible with Caché version 5 and later and is included with recent distributions of InterSystems data platforms (HealthShare, Ensemble and Caché). This post reminds you that you should download and install the latest version of pButttons.

The latest version is always available for download:

Update: See the comments below for details

To check which version you have installed now, you can run the following:

%SYS>write $$version^pButtons()

Note 1:

  • The current version of pButtons will require a license unit; future distributions will address this requirement.
  • With this distribution of pButtons, versioning has changed.
    — The prior version of pButtons was 1.16c
    — This new distribution is version 5.

Note 2:

  • pButtons version 5 also corrects a problem introduced with version 1.16a that could result in prolonged collection times. Version 1.16a was included with Caché 2015.1.0. If you have pButtons version 1.16a through 1.16c, you should download pButtons version 5 from the FTP site.

More detailed information on pButtons is available in the files included with the download and in the online Caché documentation.

Discussion (2)2
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Arto Alatalo · May 16, 2020

@Murray Oldfield 
Current version of documentation says regarding to the update

https://cedocs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GCM_pbuttons#GCM_pButtons_runsmp
This utility may be updated between releases. The latest version is available on the WRC distribution site under Tools

The xml indeed can be downloaded from WRC but no word neither about pButtons version not the way to install it. Should I simple import the xml into %SYS?

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Murray Oldfield · May 17, 2020

Hi, yes you can import using the system management portal; System >Classes Then import into %SYS.

Here is version information before;

%SYS>write $$version^SystemPerformance()
14

After import, you can see the version information changed. Also note there was a conversion run. The custom profile I had created before the import existed after the update. 

%SYS>write $$version^SystemPerformance()
$Id: //iris/2020.1.0/databases/sys/rtn/diagnostic/systemperformance.mac#1 $
%SYS>d ^SystemPerformance
Re-creating command data for new ^SystemPerformance version.
Old command data saved in ^IRIS.SystemPerformance("oldcmds").
Current log directory: /path/path/iris/mgr/
Available profiles:
     1  12hours     - 12 hour run sampling every 10 seconds
     2  24hours     - 24 hour run sampling every 10 seconds
     3  30mins      - 30 minute run sampling every 1 second
     4  4hours      - 4 hour run sampling every 5 seconds
     5  5_mins_1_sec- 5 mins 1 sec
     6  8hours      - 8 hour run sampling every 10 seconds
     7  test        - A 5 minute TEST run sampling every 30 seconds

Select profile number to run: 5

Collection of this sample data will be available in 420 seconds.
The runid for this data is 20200518_094753_5_mins_1_sec.

%SYS>

You can also import from the command line;

USER>zn "%SYS"

%SYS>do $system.OBJ.Load("/path/SystemPerformance-IRIS-All-2020.1.0-All.xml","ck")

Load started on 05/18/2020 10:02:13
Loading file /path/SystemPerformance-IRIS-All-2020.1.0-All.xml as xml
Imported object code: SystemPerformance
Load finished successfully.

%SYS>
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