I just recently got a mail regarding the latest and greatest.

I find the mail impossible to read or make any sense of.

At the bottom it says to manage my subscription.

I clicked on the link and it took me to a page that says I am denied.

All the time I am still logged in.

Then, can you tell me how do I manage my subscriptions and stop those impossible emails?

I sure wish we were back to the Google Group, I understood that.

I followed the Documentation instructions to install Caché on my Linux box and it seems to be running fine except when I try to modify the configuration. I keep getting errors that a previous cache.cpf file (e.g., cache.cpf_8503) cannot be opened. Is my Linux "user who owns instance" account deficient in Linux permissions?

During a fine breakfast at Global Summit 2016 I was asked about the %DEFAULTDB database that now appears when creating the %ALL namespace.

Presenters: Pete Greskoff, Sebastian Musielak
Task: Ensure high availability of your HealthShare deployments
Approach: Discuss high-availability options and focus on HealthShare’s new support for database mirroring

With the new release of HealthShare, Mirroring is now support for high availability. This session will describe high availability options and focus on mirroring your HealthShare deployments.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Kerry Kirkham
Task: Prevent application-to-application interface problems from escalating
Approach: Give examples of using alerts to get the right person working on a problem as soon as possible

Problems with application-to-application interfaces are inevitable but in most cases they can be fixed with little disruption as long as the right person gets to know about it as soon as possible. But delays in attention cause problems to escalate, pressure mounts and business suffers. This session looks at how monitoring and alerting can be set up to recognize problems and get the right person working on the problem in the shortest possible time so that small problems don’t turn into major issues.

Solution: Using alerts to minimize interface problems

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Usually I recommend to set the global buffer (GB) as large as possible in order to maintain in memory more globals as possible. I don't know if this is a standard recommendation, but I want to discuss what should be the best buffer size for a Ensemble instance that only process messages.

A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.

See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO.

So the questions are:

Straight-forward way to do it is well known and looks like this:
------------------------------------------------------------ sample #1 --------

In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems.

Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

C:\data\backup.bat :

C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\bin\cache -s"C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\Mgr" -U%%SYS ##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze() <C:\data\login.scr

echo %ERRORLEVEL%

rem note that we need to check errorlevel from highest to lowest here....

if errorlevel 5 goto OK

I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy. Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured.

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

Some third party backup products may by default restore CACHE.DAT files as UNIX sparse files when there are trailing zeroes in the backup file.

The support for sparse files vary from UNIX distribution and file system types. Sparse files attempt to use file system space more efficiently when blocks allocated to the file are mostly empty similar to thin-provisioned storage. The file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with zero bytes at runtime. The application is suppose to be unaware of this conversion.