Hi,

I am a newbie on the AIX front....I am at present faced with a problem of a service eating up my client's CPU. To be more specific....My client uses backup exec for backing up (v 12.0). The moment I start a backup the beremote.exe (backup exec remote agent for unix, RALUS) service uses around 80% - 90% of the CPU and this is no matter what we backup. I have tried installing an older version of the beremote (v 11d) and trying a backup but it exhibits the same behaviour. The only thing he has installed on this machine is DB2.

He normally cancels the job the moment the CPU usage goes up as his users might be affected. Therefore, I am not sure whether this will crash the system.

Basically, I wanted help on knowing how can we isolate the problem. Using core dump analysis, probably?

Do you backup your AIX server to a Windows Server with Symantec (former Veritas) Backup Exec? In this case you should own a license that entitles you to support and I'd ask Symantec to solve your problem.

However, as an AIX admin who's customer is tight I'd simply use the Workload Manager to set that agent to a fixed CPU limit. Find out how much CPU the application needs and give only the rest to the agent. WLM comes with AIX since 4.3.3 at no further cost.

Shockneck, thanks for the information....I was planning to contact symantec in case I am not able to find anything.... ....the main problem is that I am filling in for a colleague who is actually the AIX admin... I will try the Workload manager, but in case I assign a fixed cpu limit and beremote does not like it, hopefully, beremote will crash and it should not affect anything else??

If the agent dumps core it should not affect anything else.

Btw. you will probably like this little workshop:
Setting up AIX Workload Manager in 30 minutes

thanks a lot buddy, the article on WLM is a big help....