Somebody leaves, leaving behind an old-and-mangy ClearCase view. You type cleartool lsco -avobs -cview (look for checked-out elements), and all kinds of drivel comes up.

For elements with `normal' pathnames, you can get to them in the normal way and do the normal things. But what if the following is listed as checked-out? Let's say a view has the following among its checkouts:

    /vobs/test/sw@@/main/1/widget/main/1/foo/main/2/foo.c

The only way I know to get at it is to set your config spec to:

element * CHECKEDOUT
element /vobs/test/sw /main/1
element /vobs/test/sw/widget /main/1
element /vobs/test/sw/widget/foo /main/2
element * /main/LATEST

Mind-numbing, but there you go... (Anyone want to write a script that will take the output of cleartool lsco and drop you in a sequence of shells, each of which has access to a checked-out element?)

Kernel tweaks for a VOB server (HP-UX)

The most basic advice for getting good ClearCase performance is: have a dedicated VOB server, and lots of memory.

There are other things you may need to do to your server. For example, it is entirely possible to overflow kernel tables. We deal with some of that for HP-UX here. A good reference for this stuff is Optimizing ClearCase Performance on HP-UX.

If you get (in syslog) vmunix: file: table is full, you need to tweak the nfile kernel parameter (number of files open at once).
That, however, keys off of nproc, which I changed instead. It defaults to `(20+8*MAXUSERS)'; changed it to `(20+16*MAXUSERS)'.
Others ones to mess with (even if I haven't done so in a long time...) are db_max_pct and db_min_pct. These constrain how much memory is used for disk buffer cache, and are alleged to be the single most important parameter for VOB server performance. These settings are 50% and 5% by default; I once put the latter up to 15%.
You don't want too much of a good thing, e.g. 90% and 60%. If you've got a lot of memory (e.g. 1GB -- and why not on a VOB server?), that's a lot of buffer cache that the kernel has to watch over and maintain. That overhead can start to hurt you.