DBMEMPERCENT...Where'd That Come From?

I was having performance issues with a couple TSM 6.2 servers and could not find anything that pointed to the issue. I'm not one to call support unless I'm totally stumped and cannot find help through the web, but this time I finally relented and made the call. The issue was problems with backups failing repeatedly and when researched we were getting internal server errors along with DB table errors. IBM support asked for some DB2 log files and within 30 or so minutes had identified the problem.

TSM has a server option I have never used or heard of that had somehow been set that adversely affected all backups. Somehow the option DBMEMPERCENT was set in the dsmserv.opt file. This option tells TSM what percentage of the overall server's memory it can allocate for use. The default is AUTO and would have been fine, but somehow DBMEMPERCENT was set to 10 in the dsmserv.opt. Which means out of 16GB of RAM I was only using 1.6GB?!?!? How'd that happen? I didn't set it, none of my coworkers remember setting it, so where did it come from? IBM support stated the default was AUTO so the option was manually set. Since I had never used this option and its 6.x specific, I never would have looked for it. Good thing I called support.