amys@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Amy Swanson) (09/20/90)
Does anyone know what the "vhand" process does? It always runs from PID 2, but I can't find any information on it in the manuals. The reason I'm asking is that we've recently had the vhand process get out of hand and "take over the system." It was chewing up lots of CPU time and made it impossible to log into the system other the network. We sent the process a "kill -1" which seemed to fix it, but I'd like to know why this happened. Thanks in advance, Amy Amy Swanson SGI Systems Administrator NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing Applications University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign amys@ncsa.uiuc.edu
jwag@moose.asd.sgi.com (Chris Wagner) (09/21/90)
In article <amys.653844988@TheImprov>, amys@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Amy Swanson) writes: > > > Does anyone know what the "vhand" process does? It always runs from PID 2, > but I can't find any information on it in the manuals. The reason I'm > asking is that we've recently had the vhand process get out of hand and "take > over the system." It was chewing up lots of CPU time and made it impossible > to log into the system other the network. We sent the process a "kill -1" > which seemed to fix it, but I'd like to know why this happened. > > > Thanks in advance, > Amy > > > Amy Swanson > SGI Systems Administrator > NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing Applications > University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign > amys@ncsa.uiuc.edu vhand is the paging process - it is a system, process, and as such does not catch signals, etc.. The only way (unless theres a bug!) that it can take onver the system is if a user process is using so much memory and has such poor locality that the system thrashes. In this case it would be vhand that thrashes - always paging out the page that the user wants next! You may wish to try to understand what was running at the time (using ps say) Chris Wagner