Inappropriate processes being 'stopped' when the system is busy..
Hi, I'm wondering if anyone can make a suggestion here. I have been pushing my X server on my Zaurus, logged in as a regular user whilst running a large compile in the background. This is really to test the stability of the ws_drv patches that just came through on [EMAIL PROTECTED] In doing this I ran up xfce4 and loaded AbiWord as a regular user to generate some system load from that session. What I noticed after a couple of mins (with a large port compile going on as root from an ssh session) was that AbiWord, xfwm, xfce-panel, xfce-desktop etc.. had all been put into a 'stop' state on the process list. I can understand that the system may want to do this for certain processes to protect against thrashing but I honestly don't have a clear idea about what part of the system does this and if it is configurable. Strictly speaking I would have thought that you don't want X Window Manager processes like xfwm being put into a stopped state at all so I was wondering if there is a way of flagging (or listing) processes which should never be kill -STOP'ed by whatever is doing this. I ended up having to kill -STOP my compilation, kill -CONT all my user processes to wake em up and log out then kill -CONT my compilation to continue in the end. I suppose it may be possible to do this from a second vt if it's not convenient to go in over the network but maybe not always. So is this a configurable feature?? (apologies if you think this should be in [EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Andy
Re: Inappropriate processes being 'stopped' when the system is busy.. - mystery solved.
I had built and installed dbus to test some things. It seems that there is a feature that dbus tries to help the system out by suspending processes with -STOP when a user changes away from a vt and an issue where this sometimes happens even when the user doesn't switch VTs.. unfortunately when this happens the processes don't get a -CONT signal so stay in a stopped state. dbus is now off again and the issue is gone. - Andy -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Smith Sent: 03 February 2006 12:12 To: misc@openbsd.org Subject: Inappropriate processes being 'stopped' when the system is busy.. Hi, I'm wondering if anyone can make a suggestion here. I have been pushing my X server on my Zaurus, logged in as a regular user whilst running a large compile in the background. This is really to test the stability of the ws_drv patches that just came through on [EMAIL PROTECTED] In doing this I ran up xfce4 and loaded AbiWord as a regular user to generate some system load from that session. What I noticed after a couple of mins (with a large port compile going on as root from an ssh session) was that AbiWord, xfwm, xfce-panel, xfce-desktop etc.. had all been put into a 'stop' state on the process list. I can understand that the system may want to do this for certain processes to protect against thrashing but I honestly don't have a clear idea about what part of the system does this and if it is configurable. Strictly speaking I would have thought that you don't want X Window Manager processes like xfwm being put into a stopped state at all so I was wondering if there is a way of flagging (or listing) processes which should never be kill -STOP'ed by whatever is doing this. I ended up having to kill -STOP my compilation, kill -CONT all my user processes to wake em up and log out then kill -CONT my compilation to continue in the end. I suppose it may be possible to do this from a second vt if it's not convenient to go in over the network but maybe not always. So is this a configurable feature?? (apologies if you think this should be in [EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Andy