Guide to OpenVMS Performance Management

This manual provides conceptual and tutorial guidance for system managers and experienced users responsible for maintaining high system performance on OpenVMS VAX (Version 6.0) systems. It details techniques for evaluating, analyzing, and optimizing system performance, including:

• Performance Management Concepts: Understanding workload management, system responsiveness, and the relationship between workload and system capacity.
• Resource Management: A review of OpenVMS memory management (including automatic working set adjustment, swapper trimming, and proactive memory reclamation), process scheduling, and disk I/O resource management.
• Performance Monitoring: Procedures for using the MONITOR utility to collect and interpret performance data, and the Accounting utility to analyze image-level resource consumption.
• Diagnosing Limitations: Step-by-step diagnostic strategies to isolate and identify performance bottlenecks related to memory, I/O, or CPU resource limitations.
• Corrective Actions: Recommendations for compensating for identified resource limitations, such as adjusting system parameters, tuning memory management features, offloading tasks, and reconfiguring hardware.

The document emphasizes an analytical, iterative approach to tuning and includes numerous decision-tree diagrams to assist in the troubleshooting process.