An ontape archive failing for lack of available memory

Question

What is the minimum amount of contiguous memory needed for ontape archive to work?

Cause

Lack of available contiguous memory can cause ontape archive to fail with an assertion warning "ISAM error: An error has occurred during archive back up".

Answer

When you start an ontape archive, the ontape (front-end) process will allocate four blocks of contiguous memory in the size of TAPEBLK configuration parameter. If you have constraints on available memory, a workaround could be reduce the value of TAPEBLK configuration parameter to a minimum value (On UNIX: 32K and on Windows: 16K).