hp-snmp-agents cmanicd hpetfe high process creation

[peter_stig_e]

While investigating high process creation rates, examination of process accounting data led me to the hp-snmp-agents package (hp-snmp-agents-9.1.0.57-71.rhel5).  The cmanicd process in particular and how it executes the hpetfe program (every 30s), and how this bash script in turn executes very many other programs, many executions of egrep but also several other non bash builtins.  For one of the 30s runs I saw over 200 calls to clone to create child processes and over 900 (l)stats, opens or access calls that return ENOENT.

  I am able to exclude this agent by adding "cmanicd" to the exclude line in /opt/hp/hp-snmp-agents/cma.conf , I also found some docs that mention setting PFLAGS in /opt/hp/hp-snmp-agents/nic/etc/cmanicd to "-p 300" which will change the polling interval.

  I was surprised by the inefficency of this process, and the number of processes it creates.  I am posting in the hope somebody else may find this information useful, and also because I am wondering if there are plans to improve the way network information is collected.

  Thanks.