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Grex Info Item 123: Should we kill idle processes?
Entered by curby on Sat Mar 19 10:02:39 UTC 1994:

I did a 'w' last night to see if anyone else was as insomniac as me, and i
came across something slightly odd.  The newuser account was online and idle
for eight hours last night. 

Now that newusers are logging in for the first time via the internet link,
are things like this going to happen often?  Is this causing resources to
be wasted on grex that will slow it down any?  Should we consider writing
a program that sleeps for a couple of hours and then wakes up and kills
any process that has been idle for an excessive amount of time?  Would
such a program waste more resource then it would save?  Am I  being nit
picky?

--W LIST WITH IDLE NEWUSER--

  4:45am  up 1 day, 13:21,  5 users,  load average: 0.23, 0.19, 0.01
User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU  what
newuser  ttyp0     8:42pm  7:59                -
curby    ttyp1     4:44am            3         w

11 responses total.

#1 of 11 by srw on Sat Mar 19 12:51:19 1994:

My understanding is that an idle telnet session uses very few resources.
Apparently an occasional packet is sent, but this is nearly legligible
in terms of bandwid. The resources required on Grex are the swap space
needed to hold an image of the newuser program and its data.
Right now, this does not appear to be something to worry about.

If we were ever to implement a limit on the number of sessions that could
telnet in simultaneously, then I'm sure you would want to revisit this
question.

#2 of 11 by popcorn on Sat Mar 19 14:03:20 1994:

This response has been erased.

#3 of 11 by curby on Sun Mar 20 18:31:18 1994:

I'm not sure, but I think that this is the same newuser as in the original
post.  Are you positive that this user is a ghost.  If not, what user
could take two days to log in?  And how long before someone should kill
the process?

---W LIST WITH IDLE NEWUSER---
  1:22pm  up 2 days, 21:58,  7 users,  load average: 0.36, 0.24, 0.02
User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU  what
newuser  ttyp0    Fri 8pm 2days                -
curby    ttyp7     1:21pm            2         w

#4 of 11 by remmers on Mon Mar 21 00:01:19 1994:

It wasn't a ghost -- there actually was an idle newuser process
running on ttyp0.  In the interest of tidiness, I killed it.

#5 of 11 by drogers on Mon Mar 21 00:09:20 1994:

I would like to know how to append a file to a mail message. also, if I get a
mail message with a file attached, how can I read the file. thanks

#6 of 11 by scg on Mon Mar 21 01:39:36 1994:

Use pine, and put the filename in the space marked "Attachments".  If you 
want to read an attachment using pine, hit "A" while the message is on your
screen.

#7 of 11 by davel on Mon Mar 21 03:06:52 1994:

What does this do if the person at the other end isn't using pine?  In
other words, how is the attachment actually attached?  (If it's just appended,
possibly with some identifying heading line, this would *not* be cool
with a binary file unless you know the recipient's mail-reader program
can handle it the same way.)

#8 of 11 by rcurl on Mon Mar 21 05:04:41 1994:

We're fussing with this in item 120: does the resident Pine encode
a binary Attachment in MIME?

#9 of 11 by scg on Mon Mar 21 05:40:56 1994:

Yes, I think it uses MIME for that.

#10 of 11 by popcorn on Mon Mar 21 21:37:53 1994:

This response has been erased.

#11 of 11 by carson on Tue Mar 22 05:16:54 1994:

(how quickly the topic turns.)

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