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From: larry@lia.com ((Larry Barnett x5474)~ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ#HBI7695474)
Subject: Why does ps(1) put process names in parentheses?
Message-ID: <1993Aug17.223713.2704@lia.com>
Reply-To: larry@lia.com
Organization: Litton/Integrated Automation, Alameda, California
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1993 22:37:13 GMT
Lines: 34
At a site that I maintain, I frequently see output from ps(1)
which looks like the following:
liasi3 4899 0.0 0.0 136 ? IW Aug 16 2:05 (OdrSop)
^^^^^^
OdrSop is an RPC server application which is running in the
background. It controls a WORM optical drive.
Processes in this state are sometimes hard to kill. This situation
is also sometimes associated with other symptoms of system/network stress, like
unreliable remote shell calls, slow logins, etc.
The main application at this installation is a large distributed image storage
and retrieval system which uses RPC for interprocess messaging and NFS for
image file transfer.
Questions:
1) What does it mean when a process name is displayed in parentheses
like this? The best my local experts can come up with is that
ps is getting the name from "a different table" than normal.
2) Why do processes get into this state?
3) What is the root cause of the operational problems I am experiencing?
(hard-to-kill processes, etc.). How do I detect/prevent it?
If the answer is "RTFM", I would greatly appreciate a page cite.
Please send mail. I will post a summary.
Thanks in advance to all who reply.
Larry Barnett
IA Corporation
Alameda, CA