The Impact of Work Devices on MFX
The performance of MFX is almost totally independent of the number of work data sets. The sort’s performance may, however, be strongly influenced by the number of devices to which the work data sets are allocated. Generally, for any sort of significant size, the more work devices, the better the sort can perform. If the sort file size is small, however, performance improvements might be outweighed by increased overhead in managing the extra data sets. Increasing the number of work devices will:
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Improve the overlap between CPU and I/O processing.
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Improve the effectiveness of MFX’s integrated activity monitoring.
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Reduce the likelihood of SORT CAPACITY EXCEEDED.
Increasing the number of data sets without increasing the number of devices will only increase overhead.