This IBM® Redpaper™ publication documents the performance characteristic benchmarks of two high-transaction rate IBM CICS® Transaction Server for IBM z/OS® workloads:

• The first workload executes on a single IBM z13™ logical partition (LPAR) with 18 central processors (CPs) up to a rate of 174,000 CICS transactions per second.
• The second workload executes on a single z13 LPAR with 26 CPs up to a rate of 227,000 CICS transactions per second (TPS).

The motivation for the benchmark is to demonstrate some of the benefits of CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) V5.3, compared with previous releases in terms of:

• Improved performance
• Enhanced interaction with IBM z/OS Workload Manager (WLM) for transaction CPU tracking and IBM Mobile Workload Pricing (MWP)
• The ability to demonstrate the stability and scalability of CICS handling high-transaction rates in excess of those tested previously

In particular, CICS TS V5.3 has optimized transaction dispatching for HTTP requests. In this release, CICS is able to directly dispatch an application transaction for each request that it receives, without first needing to run a CWXN (web attach) transaction.

Hardware and software configuration

CICS TS V5.3 performance improvements

CICS TS V5.3 SSL versus CICS TS V5.3 AT-TLS

Applying the results to your environment