Jantje writes:
>It does not take much "duration" to have the issue occur. Just
>the time to bounce a CICS (even if it takes only a minute) can
>be enough. Been there...

Yes, agreed. It depends on the incoming message rate, the size of the
incoming messages, and how far the queue can back up. Those factors are
situational.

But what I'm wondering is whether there's been any consideration of
eliminating (or at least reducing) CICS service outages when bouncing any
particular CICS region(s). There are certainly ways (plural, probably) to
run CICS in higher availability fashion.

I suppose one alternative is to stop incoming MQ messages first, let CICS
drain the remaining messages in the queue, bounce CICS, then tell MQ to
resume accepting incoming messages. But then you've just converted your
CICS outage into an MQ outage, and thus converted a (somewhat delayed)
processing interruption into an immediate service interruption. In other
words, that sounds to me like going backwards. :-) It's also apparently
unacceptable, because the original question is premised on the problems
with having the queue fill up and stop accepting messages.

So I think the real solution here is beefing up CICS's robustness in at
least one way, unless I'm missing something in the original question. It
sounds like MQ is doing exactly what it's supposed to do (and to its
configured limit), but the thing that's draining the queue is currently
suffering from an interruption that's too long. Hence, how about we focus
on shortening (or eliminating) the interruption in the draining? I don't
really see any other way -- again, unless I'm just totally missing the true
nature of the original question.

....Or, I guess you could (if possible) get a bigger bucket, i.e. figure
out a way to enlarge the queue, to hold enough messages to survive the
drainer's outage.

Bigger queue, more timely/reliable draining, or some combination: isn't
that the full solution choice set here?

- - - - -
Timothy Sipples
IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect
Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific
E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com
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