Chapter 12. Process Management

The process is the entity that the operating system uses to control the use of system resources. AIX Version 4 introduces the use of threads to control processor-time consumption, but most of the system management tools still require the administrator to refer to the process in which a thread is running, rather than to the thread itself.

See the AIX Version 4.3 System User's Guide: Operating System and Devices for basic information on managing your own processes; for example, restarting or stopping a process that you started or scheduling a process for a later time. This guide also defines terms that describe processes, such as daemons and zombies.

For task procedures, see Process Management in the AIX Version 4.3 System Management Concepts: Operating System and Devices.

AIX contains tools to:

• Observe the creation, cancellation, identity, and resource consumption of processes.
  • ps is used to report process IDs, users, CPU-time consumption, and other attributes.
  • who -u reports the shell process ID of logged-on users.
  • svmon is used to report process real-memory consumption. (See Performance Toolbox Version 1.2 and 2 for AIX: Guide and Reference for information on the svmon command.)
  • acct mechanism writes records at process termination summarizing the process's resource use. (See how to set up an accounting system in "Accounting Overview" .)
• Control the priority level at which a process contends for the CPU.
  • nice causes a command to be run with a specified process priority. (See AIX Version 4.3 System User's Guide: Operating System and Devices.)
  • renice changes the priority of a given process.
• Terminate processes that are out of control.
  • kill sends a termination signal to one or more processes.
• Tune the operating system's process-management mechanisms.
  • schedtune permits changes to the process scheduler parameters. (See AIX Versions 3.2 and 4 Performance Tuning Guide for information on the schedtune command.)