Analyze of VOB Size Report

From the chart in my previous blog, we can see that the size of one of the VOBs, FrontEnd, has increased sharply (by 250MB) over Feb 13. There are several reason could led to this. The most possible one is new code is being introduced into source control. A simple command can do this:

cleartool setview ccadmin_view
cd /vobs/FrontEnd
cleartool find -all -elem '{created_since(13-Feb-2008)}' -print

...

/vobs/FrontEnd/.@@/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/3/Framework/main/
artemenk_CBFE15Pre/8/wsee/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/1/api.jar@@

/vobs/FrontEnd/.@@/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/3/Framework/main/
artemenk_CBFE15Pre/8/wsee/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/1/com.bea.core.annogen_1.1.0.0.jar@@

/vobs/FrontEnd/.@@/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/3/Framework/main/
artemenk_CBFE15Pre/8/wsee/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/1/com.bea.core.antlr_2.7.7.jar@@

/vobs/FrontEnd/.@@/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/3/Framework/main/
artemenk_CBFE15Pre/8/wsee/main/artemenk_CBFE15Pre/1/com.bea.core.common.security.api_4.1.0.0.jar@@
...

After browsing through the result, we can conclude that a new directory with some large libraries have been newly added to ClearCase. And the increase of the VOB size is normal.

Monitoring VOB size

Another important item to monitor is the VOB size. VOB size can impact in a couple of ways.

For an individual VOB, its size should be increasing at a stable pace. If there is a dramatic increase, it often indicates problems.

For the total size of all VOBs, if its size grows too close to the size of the file system, new disks/hardwares should be configured to support the increase. On the other hand, as the total size of VOBs increase, the backup time for ClearCase also increases. Make sure that the backup window is large enough, and the backup device has enough capacity.

Monitoring ClearCase License Usage

One of the SCM daily tasks is to monitor the ClearCase license usage. I wrote a simple script to gather the data periodically and generate an excel chart as the report.

The recent reports showed that the license usage hit our max licenses on peak hours. It means that some developers would get a "no license" error when trying ClearCase operations. The reason is that the development team started a new project and many new hires started to join the team. Based on this, we purchased new licenses to accommodate more concurrent ClearCase access.