dave@murphy.UUCP (12/11/86)
Summary: having lots of sticky-bit programs can eat up text table Line eater: enabled One other thing that you might want to check for is to see if someone has turned on the sticky bit on a lot of utilities on your machines. The sticky bit causes the program's text to remain in the page/swap space after it exits, so that when it is run again, it starts up faster. A side effect of this is that the program *permanantly* occupies a text table entry (until reboot). If you have a lot of things with the sticky bit turned on, they could be using up a lot of text table entries. You can spot stickys by looking at the program's permissions; if the last letter of the perm string is 't' instead of 'x', the sticky bit is set. For example: -rwxr-xr-t 6 root 139264 Jan 29 1986 /usr/ucb/vi You can un-sticky a program by doing "chmod -t" on it, then running it to flush out the copy remaining in the page area. Alternately, if it's something you don't want to run indiscriminately, you can do the chmod and then reboot. As far as I'm aware, the only thing that comes in the Sun distribution with the sticky bit set is "vi", so that shouldn't be a problem. There was some discussion in this group a couple of months ago about this topic, and the general consensus was that, for paged systems, you don't need to use this feature very much. So, if you have someone who is going around setting the sticky bit on everything, stop them. (Setting the sticky bit requires root access.) --- "I used to be able to sing the blues, but now I have too much money." -- Bruce Dickinson Dave Cornutt, Gould Computer Systems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL UUCP: ...!{sun,pur-ee,brl-bmd,bcopen}!gould!dcornutt or ...!{ucf-cs,allegra,codas}!novavax!houligan!dcornutt ARPA: dcornutt@gswd-vms.arpa (I'm not sure how well this works) "The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer, not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary."