Re: WANTED: Re: VM lockup with 2.4.8 / 2.4.8pre8

From: Marco Colombo (marco@esi.it)
Date: Thu Aug 16 2001 - 04:27:37 EST


On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Colonel wrote:

> In clouddancer.list.kernel, you wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> >I also propose to half badness of processes with pid < 1000 - those
> >> >processes are usually also important, because they are called during
> >> >boot-time and they usually handle important system affairs.
> >>
> >>
> >> The belief that boot started processes remain under a pid < 1000 is
> >> flawed. Simple example: the postfix mail server.
> >>
> >
> >agreed, but FWIW my postfix master daemon is pid 434
>
>
> Ah, yes that reminds me that when you take down a service and then
> start it again, you lose that nice low pid. FWIW, my master is 23034
> now. As D Ford stated, paying attention to pid value is not useful.

On a server which is anything but idle, 16bit pids cycle every 1 or 2
days. And many daemons do get restarted (syslog on RH systems), and they
do fork to perform their task (all from [x]inetd, sendmail, and the like).
PID means nothing, expecially when uptime > 100 days its pretty much a
random number (a lot of chances you already restarted almost everything,
unless your configuration is *very* stable).

.TM.

-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /			Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /		      Technical Manager
   /          /   /			 ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/		       Colombo@ESI.it

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