UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi, what would be the first things to check on a system that normally works fine, and is not so fine this morning ? Its accessing menus and various other screens 100x slower than normal.

Version: UnixWare 5 7.1.3 i386 SCO UNIX_SVR5

I have tried this pf -ef|grep paulc and found a huge list of "defunct" processes from this user, not sure if that has anything to do with it ?

I do not know sysadmin commands on SCO. But the basics go like this:

Is there significant swapping?
Free memory?
Is Paulc or someone else using lots of cpu?
Is there an I/O problem? Long wait queues, etc.
Are there hardware errors or software errors?

A huge list of defunct processes is not good. You probably have a problem with free process slots. UNIX limits the max number of processes, this limit is usually a kernel tunable value. Can you kill the parent process of these things? And hopefully the zombies will go away because init will reap them. Or. Solaris has a command that reaps dead processes, SCO may also.

I think I have sussed this.

I did lpstat -t (since the user paulc complained of slowness after he had tried to print a report).

It then showed up 3 jobs that looked strange, so I cancelled these one by one and it seems to have sorted it.

Now when I go ps -ef|grep paulc I get one line (showing as him online only).

Did any part of any of the three jobs print?
What kind of printer interface (serial/parallel/ethernet)?
Can you replicate the problem?
Some possible causes:
Defective printer interface.
Deadlock.
Runaway process.

Did any part of any of the three jobs print? NONE

What kind of printer interface (serial/parallel/ethernet)? ETHERNET

Can you replicate the problem? YES, printed again to the same printer, same outcome, printed report to different printer, worked okay.

Look for bad network card in printer, or duplicate ip address.

It prints fine from all non UNIX related programs, i.e Office apps, local desktop, PDFs etc..