Thanks, Bob. I have an old colleague who saw this question and told me the same thing privately, citing some documentation for PGM=TSSCFBK. Running off the backup would certainly be preferable. But not being a systems programmer, I'm don't know whether "in a private address space" addresses my main concern: Does that mean that six CFILE jobs, each reading a separate backup database, will relieve the high-priority pressure on the CPU?
As it was told to me, TSS gets a high priority from the system so that running the six CFILE jobs together dramatically slows down response time for others. I infer from this that although each job accesses a separate TSS database (one for each LPAR), all six LPARs use the same CPU(s)—and since TSS has a high priority, everyone suffers. I fix this by running the six jobs sequentially. Now, if I use TSSCFBK instead of TSSCFILE, would that cause the six jobs to run with a lower priority, thus enabling me to run them all at once without degrading response time? Or does the fact that it's still six TSS LIST(ACIDS) mean that the priority assigned to the jobs is still high? This is not the kind of information I would expect to find in the documentation.
Or is this the kind of question that I must ask the client's sysprog?