Enhancements to Process Monitoring

The process monitoring daemon (pmfd) in Sun Cluster has been enhanced to provide greater control of process monitoring:

• pmfd can now be used to restrict monitoring to a subset of all processes. Therefore, any performance impacts associated with monitoring can be limited to only those processes being monitored.

• pmfd is less likely to reach resource limits when the number of processes monitored is reduced.

• The new features can be used to temporarily switch off monitoring to allow processes to be traced (with truss or pstack, for example) for diagnostic purposes.

• pmfd can now correctly identify a failed process, even if its descendants are still running.

The new features are implemented through the -C option to pmfadm(1M), and are described in a revised pmfadm(1M) man page. The new option and revised man page are available for Sun Cluster 2.2 in cluster framework patch 109208, and for Sun Cluster 2.1 in patch 105458-15. Obtain the patches from your service provider or from the Sun patch web site, http://sunsolve.sun.com.