STATE SAMPLING OF INTERACTIVE VM-370 USERS

Sampling the state of interactive computer users of hardware and programming in a time-sharing system leads to an understanding of delays to users caused by contention for resources. A discussion is presented of user state sampling by means of a program called VM/Monitor on the interactive time-sharing system, VM/370, although the methodology is applicable to other time-sharing systems. Also discussed are system bottleneck detection and secondary tuning after bottlenecks have been found. Possible extensions of the technique are also presented.