A long time ago I wrote about IBM i wait accounting in i Can Tell You Why You’re Waiting. That blog is still accurate and, for those of you interested in analyzing performance, very important; wait accounting is a very powerful tool for performance analysis.
One of my long-standing “to-do’s” was to write a more in-depth article about wait accounting and also include a description of all the wait buckets, written in a way that is meaningful to more people (i.e., you don’t have to be a developer of the IBM i operating system to understand what the wait buckets mean!).
The “IBM i Wait Accounting” article, published on the IBM Developer site, explains the wait accounting technology in more detail. It also provides some information on how to get started analyzing the wait data that is available in Collection Services or Job Watcher by using the Performance Data Investigator.
At the end of the article, I’ve included a description of each of the wait buckets. Hopefully this is a helpful resource for those of you who are learning about performance data and analysis on i.
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on March 29, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.