A bulk scanning method for uncared-for processes on classroom UNIX workstations

At the University of Aizu, the Information Systems and Technology Center (ISTC) has provided UNIX workstations for student classroom facilities. Students-some of whom are beginners, often logged out, unintentionally leaving processes, some of which may waste processor resources. Such aimless running processes are often found in high load averaged hosts. We have developed a tool for periodically searching for such processes. It obtains basic information for management and for taking action to keep these hosts in a desirable state. In our university, user files are placed in the central file server and “on demand” mounted when a user starts to use a client host. With this file configuration, it takes a few seconds to “start up a user environment.” This may one reason for the long response time of remote command invocation. We designed the tool with pipelined parallel processing, and it can collect process information from each host with high throughput. The average processing time achieved for a host is less than one second while scanning more than 400 workstations. We also report the problematic processes found by this tool