Idle and Looping Process Killers?

[Ed Vielmetti]

(note followups redirected to comp.unix.admin)

In article <1991Feb27.041048.24190 at eplrx7.uucp> mroz at eplrx7.uucp (Peter Mroz) writes:

   I'm looking for a program (exe or shell script) that will kill idle processes
   on Unix.  

By "idle processes" do you mean terminals which are sitting idle with
someone logged on but no one around for hours?  Processes which are
sleeping for long periods of time don't absorb that much system
resources.  One program to log out idle users is "untamo", a version
of which can be ftp'd from mthvax.cs.miami.edu:/pub/untamo.shar.Z.

If I remember right the folks at Purdue who wrote this have absolved
themselves of any blame for deficiencies in that version and are
gradually working on a replacement.

   I also need a program that detects runaway processes. 

I find the "top" program quite useful for eyeballing what might be
wrong.  You don't say which version of unix you are running; top has
been ported to a variety of BSD-ish systems, but as far as I can tell
there's no one unified port that works on all of them.  top shows the
processes which are taking up the most cpu time at the moment, with a
display that updates at regular intervals.  Much handier than "ps" for
the task.

Deciding at which point a process is a runaway is not trivial.  Once
you have identified possible candidates, you can snoop on them further
with tools like "pmon" which let you peer into detailed per-process
statistics.

pmon and top for Ultrix are in gatekeeper.dec.com:/pub/DEC/.

-- 
 Msen	Edward Vielmetti
/|---	moderator, comp.archives
	emv at msen.com