This IBM® Redpaper™ publication describes a set of benchmarks comparing an IBM CICS® web services workload running in various configuration scenarios.

This paper starts with an IBM CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) V5.2 benchmark running on an IBM zEnterprise® EC12 (zEC12), and shows the performance characteristics of that same workload running on a similarly configured IBM z13™ (z13). We then compare the same workload running on IBM CICS TS V5.3 and demonstrate the performance benefits of CICS TS V5.3 as compared with CICS TS V5.2 for various scenarios, including Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Application Transparent Transport Layer Security (AT-TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Also covered is a comparison between CICS using SSL and CICS using AT-TLS for a configuration handling web service requests.

The intended audience for this paper is CICS systems programmers and capacity planners who have responsibility for evaluating potential benefits of migrating to a new release of CICS TS V5.3.

CICS TS configuration

Hardware and software configuration

zEC12 versus z13

CICS TS V5.3 performance improvements

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

Applying the results to your environment

Summary