Upgrading your 3000’s operating system is soon going to mean adopting either the 6.5 or 7.0 releases of MPE/iX, because HP is halting shipments of MPE/iX 6.0 as of the end of March. HP’s 3000 Release manager Jon Cohen explained that “We will stop shipping 6.0 (except for special orders) this month. We ship the last two mainline releases, and 7.0 will start shipping this month. 6.5 is still shipping.” The end of support date for 6.0 is April 30, 2002.

6.0 has been a popular resting point on the 3000 community’s march to the future. Thousands of systems were being upgraded to 6.0 from some version of 5.5, and many customers have been slow to adopt the 6.5 release, which is still being reported as slower than its predecessor. HP says the slowdowns are slight and in exchange for new functionality, but some customers report the speed decrease is greater than they expected. After one reported a slowdown of 8 percent in a big batch job, HP stepped in with advice on how to mitigate the speed slippage. Kevin Cooper said, “The file system was enhanced in 6.5 to allow files to be greater than 4Gb in size. This code impacts reads and writes to every MPE fixed record file on a 6.5 system, and adds a few percent CPU to processes which do heavy file system IO.” Allegro Consultants’ Stan Sieler said slowdowns are going to vary more than a few percent. “It depends upon the kind of file, and the amount of processing you do between reads/writes. The less processing you do, the more the changes affect you.” HP’s Cooper recommends installing the MPELXB0 patch for MPE/iX 6.5 Express 2. To avoid 6.5 slowdowns, stick to 6.0 if you can, if you don’t use big files.