hanging jobs

[Mark Sausville]

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.

When users are queried about these processes they usually say, "Huh,
what emacs (mail) job?"

Anybody else seeing something like this?

						Mark.

Mark Sausville                           MIT Media Laboratory
Computer Systems Administrator           Room E15-354
617-253-0325                             20 Ames Street
saus at media-lab.media.mit.edu             Cambridge, MA 02139