Endevor leaks storage below the 16 MB line

Products

• Endevor

Issue/Introduction

Endevor 19.0 (base GA release) and Endevor 18.1 (with PTF LU02753 applied) leaks a small amount of storage below the 16 MB line each time that an Endevor is terminated and restarted in a job step or TSO session.

Since the storage leak is small (36 KB), this symptom is normally not noticed and will surface only when Endevor is initiated and terminated many times in the same job step or TSO session. Over time, the storage below the line is exhausted.

Environment

Release : V18.1 (w/ PTF LU02753) and V19.0

Cause

Due to a bug introduced by PTF LU02753 for V18.1 (which was incorporated into the 19.0 GA level), the termination of Endevor neglects to release a small control block which is used for SVC screening, which is a technique used by Endevor to implement, for example, Alternate ID or component monitoring.

This is normally not a problem, but might surface in a job step where Endevor is initialized and terminated many times, for example:

• Repeated calls to the endevor API shutting down the API at each call
• Repeated executions of endevor batch utilities by a long-running script

Resolution

Apply PTF LU10116 for V19.0 or LU10115 for V18.1

The description of these fixes mentions a S0C4 abend running the Endevor dialog in ISPF with split screen. That was the symptom reported in the support case which originated the fixes. However, during investigation of a later case which reported a storage abend, it was found that the fix also corrects the storage leak described in this article.

Additional Information

There are many possible symptoms of a storage leak because they depends on the component that fails to acquire storage because of the leak.

Common ones are system abends related to storage which are accompanied by error message IEA705I ERROR DURING GETMAIN

The symptom observed when this storage leak was discovered was an U4093 abend with reason code 1C as the IBM Language Environment failed to get storage to initialize the environment for an endevor exit written in COBOL.