Shortlived Process Don't Appear in 'top' or 'ps' Post: 302246782

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Operating Systems HP-UX Shortlived Process Don't Appear in 'top' or 'ps' Post 302246782 by deckard on Tuesday 14th of October 2008 11:19:19 AM

10-14-2008

Registered User

Shortlived Process Don't Appear in 'top' or 'ps'

We are running a field specific middle tier application server on HP-UX. We've recently been experiencing performance problems with it and the database back end (Oracle on a separate HP-UX box). We resolved a few issues on the DB server (some kernel parameters to free up RAM that was extremely overutilized for the vxfs buffer cache) and it seems to be able to handle the load again. But as soon as that was resolved the problems that we saw on the middle tier came back.

Currently we're involved in a finger pointing battle with the company that makes the application server, HP and Oracle. Personally I believe the fault lies with the middle tier. We had someone from HP come in on a time and materials basis to analyze our DB and middle tier system and he said things look good in terms of the OS. Further investigation of performance data indicated that the third heaviest CPU and RAM eating process was a short script that the application server launches hundreds to thousands of times per minute. It seems like that process is intended to set some environment variables for it's child processes and nothing more. This seems like gross inefficiency to us. But we need to be able to figure out what process(es) spawn this script's process.

I found: 'UNIX95=1 ps -Hef' in order to see a rough process tree. (There isn't a port of 'pstree' from Linux is there?) But, we've discovered that the script processes never show up in our 'ps' or 'top' commands. However, the performance data gathered by HP's scripts (and Glance I think) seemed to keep track of those processes. My supervisor believes that the problem is that 'ps' and 'top' only get a snapshot of current activity and the script process is too quick to be captured. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it seems unlikely.

So my questions are:

1. Is there a way to control how short of a period of time that 'ps' can see?
2. Is it possible that 'ps' and 'top' can't display processes that are "too short"?

deckard

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vfork

vfork(2)							System Calls Manual							  vfork(2)

Name
       vfork - spawn new process in a virtual memory-efficient way

Syntax
       pid = vfork()
       int pid;

Description
       The  can  be used to create new processes without fully copying the address space of the old process, which is inefficient in a paged envi-
       ronment.  It is useful when the purpose of would have been to create a new system context for an The system call differs from in  that  the
       child borrows the parent's memory and thread of control until a call to or an exit (either by a call to or abnormally.)	The parent process
       is suspended while the child is using its resources.

       The system call returns a value of zero (0) in the child's context and, later, the pid of the child in the parent's context.

       The system call can normally be used just like It does not work, however, to return while running in the childs context from the  procedure
       which  called because the eventual return from would then return to a nonexistent stack frame.  Be careful, also, to call _exit rather than
       exit if you cannot call because exit will flush and close standard I/O channels and thereby cause problems in the parent process's standard
       I/O data structures.  Even with it is wrong to call exit, because buffered data would then be flushed twice.

Restrictions
       To avoid a possible deadlock situation, processes which are children in the middle of a are never sent SIGTTOU or SIGTTIN signals.  Rather,
       output or ioctls are allowed, and input attempts result in an end-of-file indication.

Diagnostics
       Same as for

See Also
       execve(2), fork(2), sigvec(2), wait(2)

																	  vfork(2)