Manage Processes
This section describes how to use the command line and find all processes that are not currently managed by Accelerator. VOV can use a vovtasker to collect information about all processes from all hosts in a farm.
Processes that are descendents of vovtasker, orphans of vovtasker, and external processes can also be found. Foster jobs can be created for discovered orphans; these jobs can be accounted for by a tasker on the same host, and tracked for the rest of their lifetime.
vovprocessmgr: Usage Message
USAGE:
% vovprocessmgr [OPTIONS]
Report on and manage processes on hosts where an Altair Engineering vovtasker
is running, for example, in Accelerator.
OPTIONS:
-h -- Show brief help.
-v -- Increase verbosity.
-w -- Wide output (tab-separated, no truncation in names).
-refresh [-orphans [-host HOST[,HOST]...] [-nohost HOST[,HOST]...]]
-- Refresh the process info. Refreshes all process info
unless the -orphans option is also passed, which
refreshes the process info for orphaned processes only.
The -host/-nohost options apply when refreshing orphaned
processes only, otherwise, all hosts are included.
Orphaned processes are determined by the presence of the
VOV_JOBID variable in the environment of the process.
Note that this is an asynchronous operation that is sent
to remote slaves, requesting them to gather and send
process information to the server. The timeliness of the
response depends on the loading of both the slaves and
of the server. For this reason, some amount of time
should be allowed between a refresh request and
reporting on processes of any type. For reports
involving only a few slaves, this could be measured in
seconds. For requests involving hundreds or thousands of
hosts, it may take several minutes for every slave to
report in. Refreshing process info is an expensive
operation that can result in a significant amount of
communication and loading on the vovserver process and
therefore should be used only when necessary.
-external -- Filter to processes that are not an descendant of slave.
-descendants -- Filter to current descendant processes of slave.
-orphans -- Filter to former descendant processes of slave. For
accurate results, refresh the process info using the
-orphans option prior to running an orphan report. An
orphan report will also include fostered jobs as well.
Note that if orphan processes are common, it is
recommended to enable automatic child process cleanup
via the slave.childProcessCleanup configuration
parameter in the policy.tcl file.
-fostered -- Filter to orphans currently being fostered.
-all -- Show all processes.
-user "USER[,USER]..." -- Filter to specified users.
-host "HOST[,HOST]..." -- Filter to specified hosts.
-exe "executableName[,exname]..." -- Filter to specified executable
names.
-noheader -- Suppress header.
-noresv -- Exclude reserved slaves.
-noexternal -- Exclude processes that are not an descendant of slave.
-nodescendants -- Exclude current descendant processes of slave.
-noorphans -- Exclude former descendant processes of slave.
-nofostered -- Exclude orphans currently being fostered.
-nouser "USER[,USER]..." -- Exclude specified users.
-nohost "HOST[,HOST]..." -- Exclude specified hosts.
-noexe "executableName[,exname]..." -- Exclude specified executable
names.
-age "TIMESPEC" -- default age 10m.
-maxrecursion "N" -- Limit in recursive check of parents (default 100).
-foster -- Create a foster job for each top-most orphaned
process. Note that if orphan processes are common,
it is recommended to enable automatic child process
cleanup via the slave.childProcessCleanup
configuration parameter in the policy.tcl file.
-clear -- Forget all information about processes from the
server (frees up memory). Must be the only option.
EXAMPLES:
% vovprocessmgr -refresh
% vovprocessmgr -refresh -orphans
% vovprocessmgr -orphans
% vovprocessmgr -all -noexternal
% vovprocessmgr -external -onlyuser john,mary,bob
% vovprocessmgr -orphans -age 3h
% vovprocessmgr -clear
The process information is accumulated in the vovserver and is released after approximately 5 minutes or until it
is refreshed, whichever occurs first. To refresh information about all processes,
use the following commands:
% vovproject enable vnc
% vovprocessmgr -refreshvovprocessmgr sends a message to all the taskers to update the information about all processes and deliver the data collection to
the vovserver. Sending all the data may take a
few seconds.
Note: This command only works for the owner of Accelerator.
All processes can now be computed that are not children of a vovtaskerroot process
with:
% vovprocessmgr -orphansFor example:
> vovprocessmgr -orphans
vovprocessmgr 07/08/2016 11:46:18: message: Analyzing 438 processes on 1 hosts that are older than 10m00s
Mininum process age: 10m00s
Exclude user: apache avahi canna daemon dbus gdm
haldaemon haldeamon htt mysql named nobody
ntp oracle postfix postgres root rpc
rpcuser smmsp xfs
Filter to orphans
Host Pid User Executable Age State RAM CPU Relation
titanus 23382 john vovsh S 10 10s orphan
titanus 23383 john vovsh S 9 0s orphan
titanus 23421 john postgres 14d00h S 212 5s orphan
To create foster jobs for discovered
orphans:
% vovprocessmgr -orphans -fosterTo track fostered jobs:
% vovprocessmgr -fosteredTo find only the processes that are older than a specified time, for example 1 day,
use the option -age as shown below:
% vovprocessmgr -orphans -age 1dRemoving unwanted processes from the farm can be necessary. For security, vovprocessmgr only provides the list of suspected orphans. Only an administrator with root privileges has the authority to access the machines to kill the processes that were listed in the information.