In the last few weeks, we have been challenged with a system that was supposed to process orders was not processing them in a timely fashion. TMON indicated that the process was sitting in an IC wait suggesting that the delay was intentional. However, the concern was that the process was waiting on some unknown resource such as the database. The process consisted of a CICS transaction that called a number of COBOL programs and accessed an ADABAS database.
In an attempt to identify the actual line of code that was causing the delay, we turned on STROBE. Since this is a CICS transaction, you have to run an “ADD ACTIVE” measurement as the CICS region is an executing job. Set the job name to the CICS region, the session duration to 10 minutes, and the target sample size to 20,000 (Change these numbers as required for your context). In addition, select the “Data Collectors” option with a “Y”. On the Data Collectors panel, select the CICS+ option with a “Y”.
On the CICS Data Collector Options, select “Collect Region Data” with a “Y” and provide the name of the transaction in the “Detail by Transaction” section of the panel.
At this point in time, the measurement should be active. Monitor the measurement of completion and then generate a profile in the foreground. You can do this in batch but it is a relatively trivial operation so it can be performed quickly in the foreground.
After the profile is generated, the transaction summary (#TUS) report indicated that 599 seconds of the measurement were attributable to one transaction. Further, all of this time was attribute to a single program. STROBE was able to provide us with the actual CICS command “EXEC CICS DELAY” and the offset of the compile a listing. We were able to take this offset error look into the compile listing and identify that the line of command that was generating the delay was an
EXEC CICS
DELAY FOR SECONDS (number_of_seconds>
END-EXEC
This proved that the delay in the process was intentional and not the result of a database or other resource contention.
