Geoff - Greetings from Up Over.  ;-)

>2. Influence of client type.
>
>   I have clients of the following types: Novell Netware, Unix, NT, and
>also NT with the Lotus Notes agent.  Since I have collocation on my
>onsite tape pool, I was able to determine that the tapes causing trouble
>all belonged to Notes clients.  Looking at a list of my tape pool today
>(about 200 volumes), I can say that for the non-Notes clients, the
>number of clusters is always less than 10.  The Notes client volumes have
>HUNDREDS (highest today is 967).
>   I don't know if this is something to do with the Notes agent itself,
>or just a result of the fact that Notes seems to generate vast numbers of
>very small documents.

Though we may have collocation activated in the server, I believe it to be
the general case that API-based clients either cannot or do not collocate.
(This is the case with HSM, at least.)  API-based clients which back up
numerous small client files thus pose a special burden on the server.

>   I was able to determine that the process spends most of its time
>waiting for data from the input tape.  In S/390 terms, every small burst
>of data transfer (few milliseconds) is followed by a Locate Block (tape
>search) function which takes more like 10 SECONDS.

What tape technology was involved?  Just curious, as some types are
bow-wow's in the Start-Stop department.

>5. How do I live with it?

I guess the ultimate solution is to not do Reclamations.  We should all
have libraries with so many tapes that the files just age out so that
the tapes go empty and return to scratch by themselves.  And we should
all be getting six-figure salaries - to the left of the decimal point.

 Richard Sims, BU