Very Computer

One of our machines is running fairly weirdly and one thing we have
noticed the presence of 8 copies of a program kproc running. Several
are owned by init and others are owned by process 0. One of the latter
has immense amounts of CPU time showing and several of the others have
lesser amounts of CPU time.

My questions are several: what is this program? why do I have so many of
them? why is the ownership so peculiar? why so much CPU time? why don't
man know anything about them? should I kill some of them?

Your attention to my problem is greatly appreciated.
--
Bob Stearns
University of Georgia

(706)542-5110

These are kernel processes for things like memory management, network
scheduling, etc.  Their presence is a positive sign that your kernel
is working.  Don't kill them.  Don't be alarmed, either when some
accumulate large amounts of CPU time, because some kernel activities
take that much.  Do be alarmed (maybe be surprised?) if you can run ps
and not find any kproc's.  :-)

kprocs are "kernel processes."  They exist for various and sundry purposes
and most certainly should not be killed off ...
--
John F. Haugh II      | Quality is ... knowing who |  MaBellNet: (512) 823-8817
SneakerNet: 042/2F068 | your customer is and what  |      VNET: HAUGH at AUSVM8
[ DoF #17 ] [ TSAKC ] | your customer wants.       |  Disc: I speak 4 me, !IBM.  

But, John,  couldn't this also be pointing to a performance problem?
When the system is humming along you'll rarely see them.  I think the key
phrase was 'system is running weird' and depending on their appl. it is
perhaps time for perfmon.  --Not that I'm trying to sound Jamaican ;-)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Al Bledsoe   214 869 3113 x 2015            home:214 327 2544


//I once had a 67 Charger with a 440 and a .513 Belvadere rearend,
\\and one bumper sticker that read: BULLSHIT!  It layed a lot of *...

|> >why so much CPU time? why don't

I'm trying to answer the CPU time question.
The kernel processes which uses some (in one case much) cpu time are
(should be the same on EVERY AIX system):
USER    PID   PPID   C    STIME    TTY  TIME CMD
root      0      0 120   Feb 05      - 80:11 swapper
root    514      0 120   Jan 01      - 15586:18 kproc
root    771      0   0   Jan 01      - 100:23 kproc
!! the uptime of this system is "up 21 days,   7:31"
!! these values are from a mod 950 which runs as NFS fileserver
!! AND runs 160 HCON SNA sessions AND around 400 user processes
!! during normal working houres. It is a busy but still fast system.

PID 0   this is the scheduler
PID 514 this is wait
        wait is a process running at fixed prio 126.
        it gets all the idle cpu time.....
PID 771 this is netw
        seems to be some network related process
--

Best regards,   Thomas Braunbeck
AS Software Service AIX, Germany

           All the opinions expressed are my own and
           do not necessarily reflect those of IBM


      DEIBM3M3 at IBMMAIL                     +49-6131-84-6800

It gets not only all the idle cpu time. krpoc (wait) is also active
when your system is waiting for block i/o to complete (paging!).
If kproc (wait) has taken very much of cpu time on a system never being
idle you have to check the amounts of memory of your applications to
improve the system performance.

Thomas