hanging jobs

[George Robbins]

In article <SAUS.89Dec6220626 at media-lab.media.mit.edu> saus at media-lab.media.mit.edu (Mark Sausville) writes:
> 
> I haven't seen anyone griping about this but it's getting bad enough
> that I thought I'd ask:
> 
> Ultrix 3.1 on VAX 6320
> 
> Certain processes seem to hang around doing something long after the
> users who had initiated them have gone home.  Emacs (gnu 18.54) and
> mail (/usr/ucb/mail - ultrix)  are two of the more prominent offending
> programs.
> 
> One notices these processes by running top(1).  They typically show up
> as having used minutes of cpu time which serves to distinguish them
> from the live programs which typically utilize seconds of cpu time.
> 
> Often, these jobs sit there eating lots of CPU doing who knows what.
> My guess is that they are polling hard for input.

Both of these guys try to catch/process the hangup signal or other
signals sent to them when the user logs out or is disconnected.

Mail seems to always do this, though perhaps only if you are in the
message entry mode.  Gnu-emacs alledgely gets stuck in a loop if you
have modified a buffer and it asks if you want it saved.

I don't know if these are simply application problems or whether Ultrix
is doing somethign a teensy bit different than other BSD systems that
causes the problem.

Note that the gnu-emacs thing can also apparently be a disk intensive
loop, with unpleasent effects if the disk it is trying to access
happens to be NFS mounted...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,	uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr at uunet.uu.net
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)