utmp entry -- we're not doing something right -- can you help?

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <327 at happym.wa.com> irv at happym.wa.com (Irving Wolfe) writes:
>It seems to work, but it doesn't work perfectly in that "ps -f" no longer can 
>find the command string associated with many of the processes that are running 
>on the system and resorts to showing things like "[ ps ]" instead of "ps 
>-fuirv" in the command field. 

having the command appear as [command] in ps -f output normally indicates
that the process is swapped out.  Your program can't be doing to do anything
that will cause this to happen (other than eating up lots of memory and 
then pausing so that it is more likely to get swapped)

>Can anyone explain why, preferably (but not necessarily) with a fix?

Since the problem is that processes are getting swapped, you need to 
do one of the following:

	1. nothing (there is nothing wrong, other than performance, when
	   some processes get swapped).
	2. add more memory
	3. do less processing
	4. go throught your programs and shrink the memory requirements
	5. or some other thing to make more memory available.

-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
uunet!virtech!cpcahil                           46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160
                                                Sterling, VA 22170