Skipdirs=yes does just what it says, it runs expiration but skips
directories - so it is not doing any more work than a normal expiration - it
is doing less work - so if anything there is less overhead with this.

We do a lot of archives and at 4.2.0 we've found that when an archive has
expired on one of our large nodes expiration just kinda hangs at that node,
numbers barely move at all.  When you run with skipdirs=yes it processes it
really fast and I assume it is actually expiring most of your data (tapes
are being freed up).

If you are not doing archives I don't know if it will help as much but it
won't hurt to try.

We still run two expires a day in a script - the first one with skipdirs the
next one a normal one.  This way most of our data was expired so we could
run reclaims etc and the other normal expiration would finish later that day
- in some cases it would take a weekend to complete.  We also used the
duration parmater (which never really worked properly at 4.2 because we had
problems when expiration was running with other processes or with client
backups.

It got to the point at 4.2 where if expiration was still running at the end
of the day (before we went home) we would recycle the server (cancel process
or cancel expiration would never work either) so that expiration would not
conflict with other things.

As mentioned 5.1.6.1 seems to have fixed all of this and perhaps some later
version of 4.2.x.

A couple of weeks ago one process examined over 22,000,000 objects -
something I think would have taken weeks to finish for us at 4.2.0.

Tim Rushforth
City of Winnipeg

-----Original Message-----
From: Joni Moyer [mailto:joni.moyer AT HIGHMARK DOT COM]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 12:06 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: UNLOAD/RELOAD DB


Will skipdirs=yes cause more overhead and performance problems?  Right now
I only have a 5 GB recovery log (which I have also been having issues with)
and I don't want to crash the TSM server.  Thanks!

Joni Moyer
Systems Programmer
joni.moyer AT highmark DOT com
(717)975-8338



                      "Rushforth, Tim"
                      <TRushforth@WINNI        To:
ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
                      PEG.CA>                  cc:
                      Sent by: "ADSM:          Subject:  Re: UNLOAD/RELOAD
DB
                      Dist Stor
                      Manager"
                      <[email protected]
                      .EDU>


                      04/09/2003 11:15
                      AM
                      Please respond to
                      "ADSM: Dist Stor
                      Manager"






Have you tried running expiration with skipdirs=yes?  This may run quicker
and expire most of the data.

When we had long runing expirations we did this (also running regular
expiration).