A minor update has been made to QLOAD to make some enhancements to the Display Summary output. This view gives you a snapshot of the queue, the sizes of the messages on the queue and the ages of the messages on the queue.

The enhancements added average age and average size to those pre-existing sections, and also a new section that summarises the queue size.

Message Ages

This section has had the average age added to the output. Of course, this is just a snapshot of what is on the queue at the moment when you run the qload command. If you want a broader view of the average age of messages on a queue, queue statistics would offer a better perspective.

Youngest Message : 3 Days 22 Hrs 43 Mins 50 Secs
Oldest   Message : 247 Weeks 2 Days 58 Mins 30 Secs
Average  Message : 133 Weeks 6 Days 7 Hrs 6 Mins 7 Secs

Message Sizes

This section has had the average size added to the output. As with the ages, this is just a point in time statement and queue statistics collection would aid in getting a better history.

Smallest Message : 4 bytes
Biggest  Message : 1.1 KBs
Average  Message : 195 bytes

Queue Size Summary

As a result of a recent customer interaction which I described here, we decided to enhance the QLOAD Display summary output with this additional report. The “size” of your queue varies depending on what you consider.

You might consider the size of your queue to be the number of messages on that queue – after all that’s what causes queue high and queue full events.

You might consider the size of your queue to be the quantity of message data that is stored on that queue. Some will consider that this should include the size of the MQMDs.

Or you might consider the size of your queue to be the amount of disk space used by the queue file.

Queue Size Summary
==================
                     Current     Maximum     Full
                    ---------   ---------  -------
Messages                12000       20000   60.0 %
Message Bytes       67.38 KBs    1.99 TBs    0.0 %
Data Bytes           4.23 MBs    1.99 TBs    0.0 %
Queue File Size         6 MBs    1.99 TBs    0.0 %

This table shows the count of all those possible “queue sizes” and the percentage full of the equivalent maximum size.

On the “Messages” row, the maximum is the maximum depth configured on the queue.

On the other three rows, the maximum is the maximum file size configured on the queue obtained from an Inquire Queue Status command.

If you have a queue manager that does not have this feature, which was added on distributed queue managers in V9.1.5, and is not applicable to z/OS, or your user ID does not have the authority to issue the Inquire Queue Status PCF command, then the final two rows are not shown, and the maximum value of the “Message Bytes” row is Max Depth x Max Message Length.

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We hope that these enhancements to the summary display will make it easier to understand the utilisation of your queues.

You can run this command as a User Command in MO71 – see this blog post for more details.

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Read more about the QLOAD program, and download a copy, from the QLOAD Download Page. If you don’t have a licence and would like to try out QLOAD then send an email to support@mqgem.com and a 1-month trial licence will be sent to you.