While DFSORT automatically optimizes many of its tuning decisions to improve performance, the environment in which it runs affects its overall performance and, therefore, the programs and applications that use DFSORT. DFSORT is designed to take advantage of the major components of the z/OS environment.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe how DFSORT modifies its operation to take advantage of these components and the benefits it derives from them.

The majority of information in this chapter applies only to sorting applications. While copying and merging are also commonly used features of DFSORT, it is sorting that uses the most resources and is the most important to tune.