2022-02 ZPARMs never stop changing!

This month I want to go through some of the absolutely most important ZPARMs that control how your Db2 systems behave in a very significant manner. All of the following ZPARMs have a performance impact of some sort and we are always trying to squeeze the last drop of performance out of our Db2 sub-systems, aren’t we?

Starting with the Easy Stuff…

CACHEDYN. YES/NO, default YES. Should always be set to YES unless you do not care about saving dynamic SQL performance. Back a few decades ago, the recommendation was to have this set to NO as default! Hard to believe that these days, where most shops have 80% – 90% dynamic SQL during the day!

Now we Get to the Numerics!

OUTBUFF. 400 – 400,000, default 4,000. This is *extremely* important and you really should set it to the highest possible value you can afford in real memory! As a minimum, it should be 102,400 KB (100MB). This is the buffer that Db2 uses to write log records before they are “really” written to disk. The larger the buffer, the greater the chance that by a ROLLBACK the data required is in the buffer and not on disk. This is a big win and the default of 4,000 KB is crazy low!

Skeletons in the Closet?

EDM_SKELETON_POOL. 5,120 – 4,194,304, default 51,200. This is one of my personal favorites (I wrote a newsletter solely on this a few years ago) The default is way to small these days. I personally recommend at least 150,000 KB and actually even more if you can back it with real memory. Just like OUTBUFF, pour your memory in here but keep an eye on paging! If Db2 starts to page you are in serious trouble! Raising this can really help with keeping your DSC in control.

DBDs are Getting Bigger…

EDMDBDC. 5,000 – 4,194,304, default 23,400. The DBD Cache is getting more and more important as, due to UTS usage, the size of DBDs is increasing all the time. The default just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore so jump up to 40,960 as soon as you can.

DSC is Always too Small!

EDMSTMTC. 5,000 – 4,194,304, default 113,386. The EDM Statement Cache (really the Dynamic Statement Cache) is where Db2 keeps a copy of the prepared statements that have been executed. So when the exact same SQL statement with the exact same set of flags and qualifiers is executed, Db2 can avoid the full prepare and just re-execute the statement. This is basically a no-brainer and should be set to at least 122,880 KB. Even up to 2TB is perfectly ok. Remember: A read from here is *much* faster than a full prepare, so you get a very quick ROI and great value for the memory invested! Keep raising the value until your flushing rates for DSC drop down to just 100’s per hour, if you can! Remember to cross check with the EDM_SKELETON_POOL ZPARM as well. It always takes two to Tango…

How Many SQLs?

MAXKEEPD. 0 – 204,800, default 5,000. The Max Kept Dyn Stmts parameter is how many prepared SQLs to keep past commit or rollback. It should be set to a minimum of 8,000 or so. Raising this might well cause a large memory demand in the ssidDBM1 address space so care must be taken.

RIDs Keep Getting Longer…

MAXRBLK. 0, 128 – 2,000,000, default 1,000,000. RID POOL SIZE is the maximum amount of memory to be available for RID Block entries. It should be at least 1,000,000 and, if you can, push it to the maximum of 2,000,000. Unless you want to switch off all RID Block access plans in which case you set it to zero – Obviously not really recommended!

Sorts Always Need More Space

MAXSORT_IN_MEMORY. 1000 to SRTPOOL. The maximum in-memory sort size is the largest available space to complete ORDER BY, GROUP BY or both SQL Clauses. Remember that this is per thread, so you must have enough memory for lots of these in parallel. The number should be between 1,000 and 2,000, but whatever value you choose, it must be less than or equal to the SRTPOOL size.

Sparse or Pair-wise Access?

MXDTCACH. 0 – 512, default 20. Max data caching is the maximum size of the sparse index or pair-wise join data cache in megabytes. If you do not use sparse index, pair-wise join, or you are not a data warehouse shop, then you can leave this at its default. Otherwise, set it to be 41 MB or higher. If it is a data warehouse subsystem, then you could set this as high as 512 MB. (This ZPARM replaced the short-lived SJMXPOOL, by the way.)

Sort Node Expansion

SRTPOOL. 240 – 128,000, default 10,000. SORT POOL SIZE is the available memory that is needed for the sort pool. The default is 10,000 KB and should really be set to 20,000 KB at least, if not more! IFCID 96 can really help you size this parameter. Remember that the number of sort nodes leapt up from 32,000 in Db2 11 to 512,000 nodes for non-parallelism sorts and 128,000 nodes for a sort within a parallel child task in Db2 12. This means raising this ZPARM can have an even greater positive effect than before.

Your “Top Ten List”

These ten ZPARMs really influence how your Db2 system works and so must always be changed with great care and attention to detail. Always do a before and after appraisal to see whether or not changing them helped or hindered your system!

And Finally…

I have updated our Pocket Tool, Performance Health Check, to check and report all these ZPARMs, as well as all the other checks like the 6 Byte RBA/LRSN or the Mapping table changes or the reason for REORG etc etc. Feel free to download and run it, as it is but a click away!

If you have any comments, or other ZPARMs you think are also important for performance, feel free to drop me a line!

TTFN,

Roy Boxwell