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Resource 3000 combines the experience and expertise of its partners to provide a unique total solution for the e3000 community. Resource 3000 offers hardware and software support and consulting as well as backup and performance solutions for those customers who have elected to remain on the e3000 platform beyond its official "end of life." In addition, R3K provides a comprehensive suite of migration tools to facilitate movement to a new platform.

"It just makes sense that, since everyone will eventually have to migrate, you would benefit from having a working relationship with your migration partner. By establishing a hardware, OS, and general environment support relationship with Resource 3000, you can establish a rapport with the same set of system experts that can provide the tools and guidance to move you into your next environment," says Dan Howard, Manager of Sales and Marketing for R3K.

Interesting Problem - Allegro

We recently received a call from a customer -- we'll call him "Steve" -- who uses one of the MPE software packages we support. Steve reported that our background job was causing serious performance problems on his system. He ran Glance and saw that our program running within the background job was impeded. (Note: We would like to recommend Resource3000 partner Lund's MetaView product as an excellent and feature rich alternative to HP's Glance/iX.)

At any rate, when you run Glance the default "global" view has a column on the far right of the screen labelled "Wait". This is usually blank for most processes, but also displays things like TERM, MEM or CPU, indicating what the process is waiting on, if anything. The impeded wait state IMP is not very common.

In addition, Steve saw a number of other processes on his system which were also impeded. Some users complained that the system was much slower than usual; others reported "frozen screens"; still others said they could not even log in.

When Steve aborted our background job system performance seemed to improve immediately. It appeared that all of the other processes which were previously impeded were now running normally. Steve reached the reasonable conclusion that our software was causing the problem, and called for tech support.

The first thing we did was ask Steve to try reproducing the problem by running our background job again. Sure enough, a few minutes after the job launched system performance began to suffer, and assorted processes were again showing the IMP wait state, including ours.

The next thing we asked for was a stack trace of what we believed to be the offending process so we could hopefully see what was going on. From within Glance you can get a stack trace of any process on the system by entering the "P" command. Glance responds by asking you to "Enter the Process Number (PIN) to monitor:". When you enter the PIN and hit RETURN you're taken to a screen full of data for that specific process, and the function keys at the botttom of the screen change to become PIN-specific. In particular, the F3 key becomes "Display Trace".

When Steve did this for our impeded program the stack trace looked like this:

PC=a.0016a70c enable_int+$2c NM* 0)
SP=418553d0 RP=a.002afb98 notify_dispatcher.block_current_process+$324 

NM 1) SP=418553d0 RP=a.002b203c notify_dispatcher+$264 
NM 2) SP=41855350 RP=a.0019ae90 wait_for_active_port+$ec 
NM 3) SP=41855250 RP=a.0019bb20 receive_from_port+$544 
NM 4) SP=418551d0 RP=a.003507e4 extend_receive+$494 
NM 5) SP=41854fd0 RP=a.0034ae00 impede_process+$40 
NM 6) SP=41854e90 RP=a.0034adac ?impede_process+$8 export stub:
a.00eb0f24 arg_regs+$28 
NM 7) SP=41854e10 RP=a.00e73b24 nm_switch_code+$94c 
NM 8) SP=41854ce0 RP=a.00e5ec5c Compatability_Mode (switch marker frame) 

CM SYS % 230.404 SWITCH'TO'NM'+%4 (Mitroc CCG) SUSER1 
CM * 0) SYS % 230.404 SWITCH'TO'NM'+%4 (Mitroc CCG) SUSER1 CM 1)
SYS % 166.4152 IMPEDE+%23 (Mitroc CCG) 
CMSWITCH CM 2) SYS % 24.5267 FORMSG+%134 (Mitroc CCG) 

MSGJOBSEG CM 3) SYS % 24.4247 GENMSG+%1465 (Mitroc CCE) MSGJOBSEG CM 4) switch
marker (Mitroc CCE) 

NM 9) SP=418549a0 RP=a.00e7279c switch_to_cm+$878 
NM a) SP=418547b0 RP=a.00a12684 genmsg+$4a8 
NM b) SP=41854430 RP=a.00a5d31c hxtellop+$20c 
NM c) SP=418540f0 RP=a.01225aac exec_cmd+$da4 
NM d) SP=41853df0 RP=a.00a62b68 ?exec_cmd+$8 export stub: a.00a65558
try_exec_cmd+$c8 
NM e) SP=41853d70 RP=a.01224a88 command_interpret+$318 
NM f) SP=418538f0 RP=a.00a62594 ?command_interpret+$8 export stub: a.00a66088
xeqcommand+$194 
NM 10) SP=418532f0 RP=a.00a6abb8 prog_execute_cmd+$1c 
NM 11) SP=41853270 RP=a.00a6ab68 ?prog_execute_cmd+$8 export stub: a.00e68bc8
COMMAND+$870 
NM 12) SP=418531f0 RP=a.00e68344 ?COMMAND+$8 export stub: 3240.00099bd4 
NM 13) SP=41852a70 RP=3240.0009af6c 
NM 14) SP=41852930 RP=3240.000b551c 
NM 15) SP=418525b0 RP=3240.000b810c 
NM 16) SP=41852430 RP=3240.000bf4a4 
NM 17) SP=41852270 RP=3240.000bfe5c 
NM 18) SP=418521f0 RP=3240.00000000 
(end of NM stack)

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