TMSCLEAN is taking much longer to run. Is there a way to improve this process?

Products

• CA 1 Tape Management

Issue/Introduction

Our TMSCLEAN job is taking longer to run now.  On a day-to-day basis (excluding weekends) it scratches around 45,000 tapes.  Before, it used to run under 3 hours with the scratching of about 270+ tapes per minute, but now it takes more than 7 hours and is scratching 100 tapes per minute.  Are there any parameters, techniques or changes that would improve the performance of TMSCLEAN?

Cause

The TS7700 microcode was recently upgraded from 8.50.2.6 to 8.51.1.26.

Environment

Release : 14.0

Component : CA 1 Tape Management

Resolution

The TS7700 microcode upgrade is causing the TMSCLEAN performance degradation.  IBM indicates that this is a known issue with CMVC 92147 and will be fixed in 8.51PGA2.