AIX

I'm assuming that using the PS command would tell me about processes running. But how can I target a process that is taking up too many resources, and slowing down the system. Even an orphan process.

Not sure what you mean by "target a process that is taking up too many resources".

To see processes and the resources they are using try nmon or top. Nmon is an add-on package, if you don't have it google it and you should be able to find a download for it.

If you find a process that you want to get rid of use the kill command to kill one process or pkill to kill a group of similar processes (i.e. all your ftp processes - pkill ftp).

Of course, this is just pointing you in the right direction. I'll leave it up to you to research the details and ask any specific questions you run into.

There is something I found out today call topas. Main thing I noticed is that it tells you what user/process is taking up most CPU% as it seems to be sorting in descending CPU% order. I'm going to assume this is what you meant by top. Seems pretty useful. Any good tutorials on topas. Is this a good admin tool to use?

Topas is very good, yes, and since AIX 5.x it is automatically installed iirc.
Also a simple vmstat can show a lot of stuff at 1st glance.
As rhfrommn said, nmon is very good too and has tools to make Excel-Sheets or graph charts etc.

To interpret such data you have to read about performance tuning as in several tuning guides on the web or the IBM Red Books.
I also like the publications of Jaqui Lynch you can find easily on the web, as this here on her webpage: http://www.circle4.com/papers/pseries-a26-aug06.pdf
Also her initial tuning recommendation is good too.

But don't look at tuning like you have some set levers that you pull and buttons you push and all get's better. There are sometimes big differences in how machines are getting used and often AIX can be tuned as well as possible and the application(s) still "spits in the soup", because it needs tuning accordingly.

Overall, experience is of course very important too, but there is a point where you have to start And where people work, problems can occure, that's natural and so absolut normal... Oh, I got philiosphic lol

Call me old-fashioned, but there is no need of an external tool. The OS already provides all the necessary information. Use "ps -Alo vsz" to get a list of the memory segments used by the processes. Add more options to the "-o" switch to get more information about the processes, see the man page of "ps" for details. A simple "sort -rn" will sort this list on memory usage in descending order.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Oops, sorry. That's the Solaris guy in me leaking through. Top is the similar command on Solaris, but you're right, on AIX it is topas.