Process Troubleshooting

Here are some tips on obvious problems you may find:

• Look for several identical jobs owned by the same user. This may come as a result of running a script that starts a lot of background jobs without waiting for any of the jobs to finish.

• Look for a process that has accumulated a large amount of CPU time. You'll see this by looking at the TIME field. Possibly, the process is in an endless loop.

• Look for a process running with a priority that is too high. Type ps -c to see the CLS field, which displays the scheduler class of each process. A process executing as a real-time (RT) process can monopolize the CPU. Or look for a timeshare (TS) process with a high nice value. A user with superuser privileges may have bumped up the priorities of this process. The system administrator can lower the priority by using the nice command.

• Look for a runaway process--one that progressively uses more and more CPU time. You can see it happening by looking at the time when the process started (STIME) and by watching the cumulation of CPU time (TIME) for awhile.