The effect that RACF® has on system performance depends directly on the type and number of RACF functions performed. The system programmer has direct control over some of these functions; this chapter identifies areas where performance issues should be addressed.

Ordinarily, when the RACF database is shared by multiple systems, RACF uses the hardware RESERVE/RELEASE capability to serialize access to the database. Using global resource serialization can minimize problems sometimes associated with hardware RESERVEs. An installation can explicitly convert hardware RESERVEs to global resource serialization ENQs.