z/OS performance options for WebSphere MQ

With workload management, you define performance goals and assign a business importance to each goal. You define the goals for work in business terms, and the system decides how much resource, such as CPU and storage, should be given to the work to meet its goal. Workload management controls the dispatching priority based on the goals you supply. Workload management raises or lowers the priority as needed to meet the specified goal. Thus, you do not need to fine-tune the exact priorities of every piece of work in the system and can focus instead on business objectives.

The three kinds of goals are:

Response time

How quickly you want the work to be processed

Execution velocity

How fast the work should be run when ready, without being delayed for processor, storage, I/O access, and queue delay

Discretionary

A category for low priority work for which there are no performance goals

Response time goals are generally appropriate for end user applications. For example, CICS users might set work load goals as response time goals. For WebSphere MQ address spaces, velocity goals are more appropriate. A small amount of the work done in the queue manager is counted toward this velocity goal but this work is critical for performance. Most of the work done by the queue manager counts towards the performance goal of the end user application. Most of the work done by the channel initiator address space counts towards its own velocity goal. The receiving and sending of MQ messages, which the channel initiator accomplishes, is typically very important for the performance of business applications using them.