News Group Posts

idleout cpu usage

Subject: Re: idle timeout
References: <a6412k$1011@imsp212.netvigator.com>
<3C87E2E6.4120@computron.com>
<60bd4c6b.0203081827.72740033@posting.google.com> 
From: spcecdt@deeptht.armory.com (John DuBois)
Date: 09 Mar 2002 11:15:51 GMT

In article <60bd4c6b.0203081827.72740033@posting.google.com>,
Brian K. White <brian@aljex.com> wrote:
>So what does that do about my users who's desktops go away on
>power-save, or who's flaky net connections break, thus leaving their
>process running without a terminal,  spinning like mad consuming 100%
>cpu for 4 days until enough of these things accumulate that they call
>me because the server is too slow?

You can probably get that under control by using 'ulimit -t' (see the ksh man
page) in the appropriate places.  I went through a year's worth of process
accounting records and found the processes that consumed the most CPU time that
were started from a shell login by a regular user and that weren't clearly
processes that had gone into spin loops, and then set a soft CPU time limit
that is high enough that given this history, it's unlikely that any process
will ever be killed for legitimate CPU consumption.  It turned out that 300
seconds was high enough; the users here mostly run lightweight apps.  I left
the hard CPU time limit unlimited, so I can remove the time limit from my X
sessions for the sake of Netscape and such.  This means that a process that
goes into a spin loop dies after 5 minutes.

>and/or an idleout program that tries to be
>nicer than "kill -9 you all" ideally with a config file that tells it
>what signals to try in what order and and with what timeout and retry
>values, and ideally with the ability to set different actions for
>different programs.

Try ftp://deepthought.armory.com/pub/admin/nidleout
Doesn't do everything you want, but is nicer about killing and far more
configurable than idleout.

        John
-- 
John DuBois  spcecdt@armory.com  KC6QKZ/AE  http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/
 

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