RM/Cobol and Linux 2

[hansie]

Hi there,

Does somebody have experience running RM/Cobol on Redhat Linux running 200-300 concurrent sessions ?
I'm currently evaluating this platform to run a reasonable critical application.
In this case we are testing Redhat Enterprise AS on a Sun Intel platform.
Any info would be welcome ...

Hans

 

[fredericofonseca]

Hum. RM/COBOL can handle more than that, but performance will depend on the size/number of files processed simultaneously.

More info is required, and depending on how you deal with files there may be some options for you.


Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[hansie]

Hi Frederico,

Thanks for your reply. We are using the standard 'flat files' with RM/Cobol.
We are running 30 companies, each using 150 files on this system. Currently we host 170 users avg. We have absolutely no performance problems so far. In the near future we want to migrate to Redhat AS with 250 users avg. I was wondering if anybody has experience with RM & Redhat.

Hans.

 

[Truusvlugindewind]

Hi Hans (sounds dutch),

Please keep "us" (I can only speak for myself) informed about your progress.
I am very interested in the process of porting a NCR-Unix/RM/COBOL site ports to linux.

I've seen Micro Focus and Acu run on linux. I've only heared of RM. So please keep posting. Not only problems but also successtories.

Thanks in advance.

 

[hansie]

Hi Truus (klinkt absoluut Hollands),

We are making a move (probably) from NCR UNIX MPRAS to Redhat AS on a Sun Intel with RM/Cobol.
At his moment, as mentioned earlier, we have absolutely no problems in performance or stablilty. Besides the 170 users connected, we have incomming hits from the internet (40.000 a day) for real-time ordering.
We also did some benchmarking (heavy IO) on Sun Sparc 1,2G Solaris and Sun Intel 3,0G with Redhat. The Sun Intel platform was almost twice as fast !!

Regards,
Hans

 

[Truusvlugindewind]

Dag Hans (Truus is mijn schuilnaam)

How do you connect those 170 users? I assume TELNET connections and CUA based applications. Am I right?

Just out of curiousity: is you company located at Bodegraven?

Groet, (nep)Truus

 

[hansie]

5 km south of Rotterdam

indeed character-based, internet pure html !
what is CUA ? (character ....)

Hans

 

[Truusvlugindewind]

CUA = Common user Access. An old IBM-SAA term. Counterpart of GUI.

 

[mrregan]

We have converted several sites from NCR Unix/RM Cobol to Redhat. We just copy the files and the programs from the NCR box to the Redhat box and fire it up. No recompiling or script changes!

 

[fredericofonseca]

Hans,

How did you do the benchmarking? Do you have a copy of the runtime for Linux? if so then you already know how it behaves on that environment, and what problems you may have from changing from NCR UNIX MPRAS to Linux. (I assume no one is going to be working on the console!).

You mention 40.000 hits from the internet.
How do you have this setup? CGI, or other? This is where I would expect the more problems to occur (to many possible users at the same time).

When you mention flat files, are there Indexed, relative or plain (line) sequential files? (I would expect most to be indexed, but may be wrong).

If you at the moment have 170 users on a "slower" machine I would expect your new setup to work without any problems.
I have customers with 256 users without any problem on heavy systems (e.g. files with nearly 2GB in size, and on one situation even more).


Truusvlugindewind

If you are using RM/COBOL 85 on your site then your files/objects don't even need to be recompiled/converted. Just copy then and use the correct runtime.

If you use loads of scripts (c-shell, kshell or bourne shell) you may need to change some, but you won't know that until you try. Most of them should be ok.
If you are trying to do this ask your Liant supplier for an evaluation runtime for Linux and try it, as this will be the best for you.



Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[k5tm]

Make sure you are in Binary mode when copying all those files (with exception of line sequential).

Tom Morrison

http://www.liant.com

 

[Truusvlugindewind]

And make sure that the sending and receiving machine use the same architicture. When you have binary fields in your records you might run into big endian trouble.

You can check using the code of an earlier post: thread209-384414

 

[hansie]

Frederico,

The move from NCR MPRAS to Redhat is because MPRAS is end-of-live. My concern is how RH behaves with 250 users day-in, day-out, regarding memory-management etc.

I did the benchmarking with evaluation-runtimes supplied by Liant on several platforms.
In this case the benchmark is IO-intesive, a lot read, write and rewrites etc.

The hits by internet is done by CGI, every hit invokes the runtime, indeed a point of discussion, when you receive a lot of hits the same time. But, until now, we have no performance problems, customers (b2b) are very satisfied with our internet-ordering system, and is the fasted one in the branche. Liant didn't expect problems in the future as well: "Unix & a few Gb's of memery solves the problem!".

With flat-files I mean indeed Indexed files.


Mrregan,

How many users max did you connect with RH ?


Tom,

Do you have references for me, RM & RH & users ?

Hans

 

[mrregan]

The most users we connected for one customer was 64. The machine has 1 GB of memory. The avg processor load for the machine shows less than 5% on a day to day basis. No user data files are installed on the 1st unix drive. We do not use raid mapping.

 

[k5tm]

Hans,

Linux (typically RH) is now, I think, our top selling Unix variant. We can supply a reference or two, including a very well known company that is using Linux/RM in its principal mission-critical application under heavy load, but the best channel for references is through our sales department.

We test our product on some really substantial multiprocessor (SMP) Linux boxes. We even found, and worked around, a bug in the PowerPC SMP kernel.

Hans, my educated guess is that you won't have any problems, but I encourage you to contact sales to get references.

Tom Morrison

http://www.liant.com

 

[hansie]

Tom,

I already have contact with Liant in the UK, I understood that RM for Linux is the way to go .... I hope, by this post, to get more reactions what's living in 'the world'

Thanks,
Hans

 

[meshi99]

I am involved in 500 user RH Linux RM/COBOL 7.1 project for Travel Agency. The system works fine and serves beside
the Head Office about 30 brances and quite "heavy duty" web site based ordering system. The migration from the old platform (SCO) took a few days only and now we are expecting the release of new web tools from Liant Software
in order to upgrade to the newest RM/COBOL version (8).

 

[hansie]

Meshi,

Thanks for your reply ...
The webtools from Liant are probably CGI-bases ?

Hans

 

[k5tm]

Hans,

The new web tools are XML based. The old web tools were CGI based.

The new product is called Business Information Server, or simply BIS. It is available for both Microsoft IIS and Linux/Apache (with other Unix/Apache platforms possible) on a limited release basis right now, and will soon be available for general release (the User Guide is still being changed). BIS makes extensive use of the capabilities of Liant's XML Toolkit, which has been available for quite a while.

BIS allows the RM/COBOL developer a means to bring his legacy applications to the web, either to provide a browser interface (XHTML) or to provide web services (SOAP). Unlike earlier CGI based products, BIS provides session control, allowing the RM/COBOL program to interact with a client browser or other user agent without having to save state (i.e. close files and STOP RUN) between each interaction.

I will soon be able to provide a link to our web site for a small white paper describing the technology.

Tom Morrison

http://www.liant.com

 

[hansie]

Tom,

Good news ...
please keep me informed

Hans