[KLUG Members] Informix ODBC Gehenna

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >Hopefully sanity prevails. I love those "we gotta pitch everything"
> >guys.
> Well yes.  But if you have seen the 'type a command first and ask what
> we should do latter' approach of our other guy... 

Mm, those are fun too.

> >Ok, no connection refused messages.  

Can you cut-n-paste what you see when you try to telnet to the online
port on the server?  Are you using the windows telnet client (which
doesn't report anything useful)?  If so try telneting to that port from
another UNIX/Linux box if you have one around.

> >BTW, your checkpoints are basically instantaneous (I'm assuming your
> >business is open when this was taken),  you might be able to move
> >CKPTINTVL up a little and increase write throughput.  It looks like the
> >default value of 300 seconds.  Just make sure CLEANERS is set to the
> >number of physical drives (assuming that number is less than 10).  
> You da man.  Thanks.  I will do what I can to implement these things.

Some quick formulas that might help are -

(bufwaits/(pagreads/buffwrites)) - If that is more than 10% you need to
allocate more BUFFERS or else your grinding your disks during searches. 
Of course more BUFFERS may require more RAM.

diffRA=ABS((idxa-RA+idx-RA+da-RA)-RA-pgsused))

If diffRA is much about 10,000 you need to investigate RA_PAGES and
RA_THRESHOLD as these control read-ahead, and diffRA indicates roughly
the number of times the server has failed to anticipate required data or
just not been able to read ahead.

All these values can be gathered with a simple "onstat" command with not
options.

> >Does your onconfig file have a NETTYPE soctcp entry?  Or just an ipcshm
> >entry?
> /i/informix/etc/onconfig.gtyserver1 has no NETTYPE line.

And thats the file referred to by $ONCONFIG.  It must be using some
default then;  if so you should whack the DBA upside the head and tell
him to insert from meaningful values.

> Does "netstat -ap" on the server show a line like -
> tcp        0      0 *:online                *:*                    
> LISTEN

Good, then the server is listening.  You should be able to connect to
that port with some simple TCP client like telnet,  if not there is
something in the way.

> Netstat -ap does not work but -a does.

Must be a SCO-ism.  Not a big SCO fan.