Isolating the Cause

Once a problem is reproducible, you can attempt to isolate its cause. Isolation involves eliminating potential causes until you have pinpointed exactly what causes the error to occur.

The following strategies can be used to determine the cause of an environmental problem:

• Run the application on another computer system. This process helps to determine if hardware problems are involved.

• Remove external processes from your system. If the problem does not recur, it could have been a result of system stresses created by these external processes, or the external processes could be interfering with your application.

• Reduce memory requirements by changing various options in the configuration files (e.g., buffers, sort buffers, descriptors, maximum forms, etc. - see Configuration Tuning topics).

• If possible, try changing your operating system configuration (e.g., system limits on resources, such as the number of files, number of locks, and so on) before running your application.

Try these strategies one at a time. If your problem disappears, you may have discovered its cause.

The object of the isolation process is to pinpoint the problem. For example, do not worry if reducing memory usage affects performance. If memory usage is causing the problem, at least you can trade some performance for correct operation.