henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/29/84)
We've turned on the kernel's process-accounting subsystem, and intend
to leave it on for the rest of the week. We don't use this stuff for
billing and consequently it's turned off normally. The reason for
turning it on for a week is that we'd like some statistics on how
frequently the various commands are used, so we can contemplate doing
things like sorting the system command directories for faster lookup.
A week's worth of process accounting will be a truly vast volume of
data -- probably several megabytes -- but I think the overhead of doing
the data collection is modest enough not to be a serious problem.
/etc/rc and shutdown(1) have been adjusted to match: shutdown turns
accounting off, and /etc/rc looks for a file /etc/acctfile containing
the name of an accounting file to give the kernel. These mechanisms
can remain in place, since a null or missing /etc/acctfile bypasses
the accounting-startup code in /etc/rc.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry