[Scottish] Damn those pesky processess....

[Colin McKinnon]

On Tuesday 20 July 2004 00:41, Kyle Gordon wrote:
> Could be updatedb running, if you have slocate or locate installed. Usually
> if the box is quiet, and something is thrashing the disk, then you can spot
> it with 'top'. Failing that, you could try lsof, netstat, vmstat, sar.
>

On Monday 19 July 2004 22:32, Jamie MacIsaac wrote:
>
> to about 17+). Antivirus software (Trend InterScan) on the mailserver
> turned out to be the culprit[0] - anything like that a possibilty?

Not on this box. The problem with sar/vmstat/iostat is that they can't give 
detail about which process the activity belongs to, and netstat/lsof just 
give  a snapshot of the state of the system - not what it's been doing 
recently.

Ray suggested filemon but it's supplied as binaries compiled with gcc2 (and my 
boxes are gcc3 based). I've emailed the developer ... so we'll see what 
happens.

> I know there are others, but I can't think of them at this time of the
> night :-(
>

Surprisingly few. The Sun boffins have come up with a package called dtrace 
which looks very funky for black-belt systems administration....but only on 
Solaris.

I did find what looks like a good guide to performance tuning at:
http://people.redhat.com/alikins/system_tuning.html

I suspect there might be some useful info in the /proc filesystem somewhere 
(http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/howlinuxworks/linux_hlproc.html) but I 
need to write something to seperate the wood from the trees.

Thanks,

Colin