Dispatch priority setting for PDSMAN?

Products

• PDSMAN

Issue/Introduction

What is the optimum dispatch priority for PDSMAN?

Environment

z/OS

Resolution

Due to the performance impact that PDSMAN offers and the intercepts utilized the best practice recommendation would be to set the dispatch priority the same as you would JES or MVS started tasks. In most environments this would be "SYSSTC". 

This is typically labeled as Service Class by IBM.

Additional Information

The PDSMAN and PDSMDB tasks should ideally run with a dispatching priority just under JES2 - or about 250.

An alternative would be to set the PDSMAN database MAXENQHOLD parameter to a higher value. For example, with $DATABASE MAXENQHOLD=10000 in PDSMINIT, PDSMDB would hold the ENQ for 10 seconds and hopefully have enough time for a request to complete.