topic Re: T4 - showing processes in Operating System - OpenVMS

T4 - showing processes

TMcB — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:44:16 GMT

hi there.
We have T4 up and running and are able to see CPU 100% busy during certain hours.
Can I then tell within T4 what process were hogging the CPU - like you would using mon process/topcpu?

thanks for your advice

Re: T4 - showing processes

Hein van den Heuvel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:54:05 GMT

>>> Can I then tell within T4 what process were hogging the CPU -

Not directly from the T4 / TLviz, but you can probably just get it from the MONITOR data that T4 pulls the data from. Just look around in T4$DATA for the real monitor file, and use that as input for a monitor session with /beg and /end derived from the T4 highlighted high usage periods.

And while in T4 you may want to check out the MODE counts to see if those loops were in USER mode, or spread.

Depending on the application usage you may also want to get ACCOUNTING reports. Specially for shorter sessions (batch jobs, sub programs) a high CPU use is prettty clear there. For long (days) connected interactive sessions accounting does help much.

Hope this helps some.
Hein van den Heuvel
HvdH Performance Consulting

Re: T4 - showing processes

TMcB — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:56:29 GMT

thanks so much for such a prompt response.

i shall start hunting in the files - I suspect it is batch jobs

Thanks again

Re: T4 - showing processes

Hein van den Heuvel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:02:42 GMT

hein>>> For long (days) connected interactive sessions accounting does help much.

ooops.... does NOT help much.

TMcb>> thanks so much for such a prompt response.

You just entered while I was doing my morning coffee-break scan of the ITRC topics. :-)

>> i shall start hunting in the files - I suspect it is batch jobs

Then do not underestimate the power of the accounting file. Grab a full output, maybe selecting batch jobs alone at first, and do some sort and filtering on the CPU used.

Maybe just looking for anything with more than say 10 minutes of CPU will reduce the data enough.

I have quick & dirty perl helpers to do process such data.

Cheers,
Hein

Thanks again

Re: T4 - showing processes

John Gillings — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:30:35 GMT

TMcB,

Not necessarily retrospectivly, but if you have a set of known processes you can have T4 include them in the statistics.

Look inside T4$SYS:T4$COLLECT.COM, you'll find a T4Extr command with /PROCESS=(list of names...) which you're allowed (supposed?) to edit for your needs. Note this applies to the extraction of data, not the collection, so if you've kept your raw data you can rerun the extraction.

Once you've included the processes, you can then use TLViz to run a correlation against your 100%CPU times to find processes with matching CPU usage profiles.

A neat feature of the extraction is it allows the use of wildcards to gather aggregated statistics for a set of processes with similar names. For example, we have groups of processes with systematic names of the form:

prefix_name_suffix

extracting data as:

prefix_*,prefix_name1_*,prefix_name2_*,... prefix_name1_1, prefix_name1_2, prefix_name1_3, prefix_name2_1, etc...

we can then see the process statistics for the whole subsystem, for each subgroup and for each individual process.

Note: I don't like the way T4 expects users to edit the collector. There should be a site specific callout procedure to define site specific things like list of processes of interest. Unfortunately, with the state of T4 engineering (all but non-existant, except for volunteer efforts) it's unlikely to ever happen :-(

Re: T4 - showing processes

Ranjan Sarangi — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:24:08 GMT

T4 generates the TlViz graphs based on MONITOR recorded data at the end of the T4 collection interval. We can get per process CPU utilisation data from the MONITOR recorded file(T4_____Mon.Dat) which must be present at T4$DATA location. As Hein said, we can playback this monitor file with the below command to get the top CPU consuming Process name list.

$ MONITOR PROCESS/TOPCPU

If we are observing a higher CPU utilisation for a specific interval, we can specify the time period as well with /BEGIN & /END qualifier for a specific interval. Once we have the process name list, we can extract the CPU utilisation per process using t4extr utility provided by T4 for whole collection interval..

$Set Command T4$Sys:T4$Mon_Extract
$T4Extr 4_VMSCL_29JUN2010_1710_1712_Mon.Dat -
/Csv_File=.Csv -
/Format=Extended -
/Class=(All,NoScs,NoDisk,NoRms) -
/Process_Name=
("*LMD0*","*SHAD*","*PRODOPER*","*BATCH*","*ASSEM*","*T4*","*TDC*")

With the qualifier /process_name we can specifiy the process names for which we are interested in. It is not necessary to modify T4$COLLECT.COM all the time, when we are looking for specific process information.

- ranjan

Re: T4 - showing processes

Divya Manoharan — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:47:22 GMT

Hi John,

Thanks for the suggestion on T4. If you have any further suggestions on improving T4, please send a mail to T4@hp.com so that it will be considered for the future release of T4.

Regards,
Divya

Re: T4 - showing processes

P Muralidhar Kini — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:48:40 GMT

Hi TMcB,

Some useful links-

* T4 Faq's
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/t4_faq.html

* Graphing data collected by T4
http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1345380

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Murali