Word association and housekeeping

Looking through the window searching for a topic I’d like to cover and basically nothing is coming through (sun, rain or inspiration). I had in mind to do something with housekeeping but I think I’ve already covered purge.
The only thing that sticks to my mind and basically blocks my thought is the following:

The problem is that everytime I choose housekeeper in Murex, I always think of this scene from Family guy. The association is deep anchored and I can’t refrain thinking “I come in anyway” when I double click on the housekeeper group.

Oh well, I hope I also created that association for you now and that you will have a smile next time you need to do a purge (in Murex of course!)

Calypso and SAP

I could have thrown couple of other names and this post would start to be list of competitors. But found the following article:

Interesting article

Initially, I was like “Wow, that’s a big one” (announcement effect), but then before drifting to sleep (couple of hours not later, and not at work!), rethinking about it, I did not see massive synergies.

For instance, posting Calypso entries to the GL (provided if SAP is the GL), is a simple question of report formatting. If SAP is managing business banking, the activity itself due to its pure volume needs to be completely outside Calypso (or whichever trading system) and just send aggregates once or couple of times a day to the trading system for liquidity and risk management. Again it is another interface (and really not a tough one) which would take couple of hours to be codded in Murex.

So I struggle to find big synergies. Even during selection processes, it is not such a game changer (to me).

I know that SAP is like a giant octopus, reaching into far places into companies, so I might forget something. If someone would be kid enough to correct me or expose his point of view, I’d happily discuss it further through the comments here or the forum!

Last (minute) action hero

I started to have some comments that with a post a week during the holidays, there was no more Friday funnies! Worst of all, because I forgot to program this post, it ends up being posted on Thursday! Oh well, could have waited 1 more day and that would have actually be a Friday funny.
Today, I wanted to tackle with a pinch of humour (that’s what I like to believe) the very important subject of waiting for the last minute to do something.
Not sure if that’s a characteristic of Murex consultants in general or of everyone (I tend to believe in the later, except that Murex consultants take it to the next level, or the boss level, or the extra hard post game level), but there’s indeed a strong habit of waiting as much as possible before doing something.
It’s a bit like driving fast up a cliff and stopping as close as possible to the gap. You might be shocked by this metaphor (seems extreme indeed to compare a daredevil stunt to writing a document) but it is spot on! Because if you don’t do it right: you will crash and burn. Especially if your estimations are off and what you assume would take 1h, takes in fact a day.
Real life example: customer calls, has a problem with a report. (it’s 10am on a Monday). He was due to deliver the report at 9am. Best of all, he pretty much had few weeks to work on it, but only started on Sunday night. Kudos for working on Sunday night, but if he had tested before, he would not have crashed and burned. (I know that I repeat myself but that’s ok because I know that I repeat myself a lot.)
Errr, moving on. The metaphor, the example they were designed to scare you. I think it’s pretty fair to say that it did not work and I know exactly the feeling: the satisfaction of having cleaned your to-do list does not bring a fraction of the motivation of a close deadline. The only thing that worked for me is to register the tasks in my to-do with a closer due date. This actually does work: the guilt of having overdue items in my to-do is really unpleasant.
And you dear reader, do you do all your tasks as they come or you live next to the coffee machine with the anxiety of not being able to finish the job that was due 2 hours ago?

Performance, point of failures

Today’s post is really about performance and more importantly how to ensure that you do not reach a point where your Murex implementation fails. I’m going to mostly focus on Application server, so you don’t need to read it all if you’re not interested!

You can have multiple cause for a slower (or badly) Murex installation. I will share my experience and hopefully you’ll know what to look for.

CPU

CPU is usually the one that will give you less problems especially if you followed Murex recommendations. You might run into CPU related problems if you multiply environments running on the same machine and running heavy CPU bound jobs: reports, simulations for instance. But in production, the only times I’ve seen performance degradation due to CPU were due to aging hardware and an increased bank activity.

Memory

Memory on Unix is quite cheap and it is rare to run out of it. The problem is that as soon as Unix/Linux/DOS (I’m kidding for the last one) runs out of memory, it starts swapping (using hard disk space to temporary storing memory content). It slows down quite a fair bit the processes. But Murex processes do not consume much memory server wise, so except if you start spamming lots and lots of processes with heavy memory usage (large viewers, simulations), again another area that should be fine.

Disk space

This one is most often the culprit. Services starting to fail, not starting, etc… Very likely the server has run out of disk space. It could be log files being too detailed, database traces turned on for all sessions causing a large amount of files to be generated. Core files if not sent to another segment also will cause massive disk usage.

It is very easy to correct and your system admin will monitor usually that one closely. But I don’t know how many times we ran out of disk space due to log files/traces taking too much space.

Network

Normally this one is not so much an issue in terms of hardware. Just accept that if you’re far from the server, your ping time will increase leading to a not so smooth experience especially in screens such as Mxmlexchange.

But firewalls between clients and servers (or in between servers) can lead to slowness, issues which unfortunately are not so easy to track. Had a fair share of these issues and I start to get a nervous reaction whenever someone mentions firewall around each server!

 

Alright, I hope this post would have help some of you. In a general manner, performance issues are rare especially when you keep the 4 points above in checks.