Best Practices for Managing IBM i Jobs and Output

Jobs and spooled output consume system resources, mainly the CPU used to create and manage them and the storage to contain them. Typically, in most environments, you can manage resources that jobs and spooled files consume successfully. However, on the largest systems, with the largest numbers of jobs and very large numbers of spooled files, you can encounter limits. Too many jobs can fill up the job table, or too many spooled files can consume all the system's storage. Having a large number of jobs and spooled files in the system can contribute to potentially long IPLs for unexpected outages. Having a very large number of spooled files on a single output queue can result in lock contention. This IBM® Redpaper publication describes best practices and recommendations for managing jobs and spooled output on IBM i. It provides an overview of the various controls within the IBM i operating system that you can configure to adjust the limits for spooled output and jobs. It also provides recommendations for setting these values. We do not explain in detail each of the configuration controls that we discuss in this paper. Rather, if you need additional information regarding the topics that we discuss, see the IBM i 6.1 Information Center at: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/