PIE®/CICS-Availability Plus

An important part of improving response time is reducing the time a task waits in a queue before being dispatched. Typically, as the load increases on a CICS system, more tasks are queued waiting for system resources. At some point, average response time becomes a function of queue length. With a light load (less than 50% CPU usage), queue wait times are usually negligible, however, as the load approaches about 50-70% of CICS capacity, queuing time begins to increase exponentially.

PIE/CICS-Availability Plus solves typical load balancing problems by allowing multiple AORs to process similar transactions. This enables you to distribute work evenly across your AORs. For example, when transactions must run together in the same AOR, you can route the whole group to several AORs to evenly distribute the combined load.

If a single application has an extremely heavy load, you can isolate it and duplicate the work across several AORs.

If you want, you can distribute the load evenly by sending all your transactions to two or three AORs. PIE/CICS-Availability Plus automatically routes transactions to the appropriate AOR using one of several load balancing techniques. Because you have more control over load balancing across regions, you can minimize the occurrences of an AOR reaching its limiting capacity while other regions remain relatively idle.