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IRA200E AUXILIARY STORAGE SHORTAGE after upgrade to CICS TS 5.2

Question & Answer


Question

Why am I receiving message IRA200E AUXILIARY STORAGE SHORTAGE after upgrading to CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (CICS TS) V5.2? The CICS region was just beginning to initialize. The last few messages were:

DFHSM0601I Limit of above the bar storage available is 100G from SMF.
DFHSM0122I Limit of DSA storage below 16MB is 6,144K.
DFHSM0123I Limit of DSA storage above 16MB is 90M.
DFHSM0113I Storage protection is not active.
DFHSM0126I Transaction isolation is not active.
DFHDM0101I CICS is initializing.

The CICS region hangs at that point. Then, the LPAR stops working due to a lack of z/OS (MVS) auxiliary storage.

I see MVS messages:

 IRA200E AUXILIARY STORAGE SHORTAGE
                    ASID  FRAMES       SLOTS         % OF AUX
 IRA206I MYRGN      0088  0002766093   0000985706       32.9

Answer

In this case, "MYRGN" consumed most of the z/OS auxiliary storage. The storage was filled with eyecatchers like this:

DFHSMQPH LD_CSECT

DFHLDCSECTL

DFHISCO 650 06/29/12.10.06..

There were many DFHISCO entries, then repeat the DFHLDCSECTL.

The problem was caused by a back level CICS TS 3.2 version of module DFHISDML in a load library. This load library included the DFHISCO module. The back level code caused unpredictable results, including GETMAIN requests for almost all Above The Bar storage in the LPAR. This used up all of the auxiliary storage and stopped any process from being able to page storage in and out of memory.

CICS requires that this code be at the same level as the rest of the region. If you upgrade to CICS TS V5.2, you should make sure that no code is still pulled in from previous releases of CICS.

In this case, there was only 13Gig of auxiliary storage. Allowing the CICS region to grow up to 100Gig overwhelmed the storage. If you can lower CICS' MEMLIMIT to less than the system's auxiliary capacity, that might stop CICS from causing an outage for the operating system until you can find and remove the out of data code. See Estimating, checking, and setting MEMLIMIT in the CICS documentation to see how you can configure MEMLIMIT for CICS.

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Product Synonym

CICS/TS CICSTS CICS TS CICS Transaction Server

Document Information

Modified date:
08 June 2016

UID

dwa1277369

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