I have a TSM/AIX server v4.2.1.6 running under AIX 4.3.3 on an H70. TSM is the
only application running on this box. I have about 300 Unix and NT clients
backing up close to 500 GB of incremental everyday on this server. TSM server
database size is 87.5 GB and 75% utilized. TSM server log size is 5 GB. Clients
dump the data into staging area which is 450 GB in size. I have 6 3590E drives
in a 3494 library connected to this TSM server. I have one 100 Mbits full duplex
network connection. All the disks are EMC disks.

For past few months we are seeing performance of TSM server going from bad to
worse. Lately the backups have come to crawling halt. For example the NT cluster
servers which use to take 6-8 hours to complete the backups now take 20-24 hours
or more to complete the backups. All diagnostic and performance data points to
problem with database. CPU and memory utilization never exceeds 40-50%.  IOSTAT
constantly shows %tm_act 100 with very little Kb_read/wrtn. Filemon data for
physical volume of database shows seeks 10 times more than seeks for other
volumes and init as 0. This TSM server was setup about two year ago. We have
never unloaded/reloaded the database or run any form of compaction.

Question I have are:
 what can I do to improve the performance?
how long will it take to perform 65 GB database unload/reload?
currently the database consists of 88 files each 1 GB in size. If add another
set of 8 files 10 GB in size and use dbvol delete command, TSM will move the
contents to new set of volumes. Will this process do any compaction and improve
the database performance?

Thanks in advance....

Mubashir Farooqi
World Bank, HQ