The story
Recently I came upon a client who was having issues with the backup on a power system. The time it took to make the backup had increased immensly over the past year.
The analysis
We traced back the root cause to a folder in the IFS. It had a huge amount of log files. Up to the point that we were unable to display the folder as there were simply too many.
Because of the amount of small files, the backup time was increased to a bit less than 5 hours where it was originally 1.5 hours.
The right tool for the right job
After a brief brainstorm we decided not to go for a CL or RPG program, but a small java program to do a daily check & cleanup. It's native, performant, easy and gets the job done. Your IBM Power System can run java without any problem.
The solution
Cleanup and zip old files, easy as that. But we didn't want to implement half of a solution. Because the program that generated the logs ran many times a day, a one time cleanup wouldn't suffice. We wanted a stable solution and it had to be future-proof.
After talking to the analyst, here is what we came up with:
- Keep the log files for 7 days.
- Everything from 8-30 days, keep it but zip it to save diskspace.
- Older than 30 days can be deleted.
Why is this important?
There are many tools and programs out there that are based on java. They might be usefull, speed up the work or act as an interface with your power system. There is no need to setup yet again another machine just to run java. Keep it simple, make your life easy and re-use your existing system.
