V-2600 CPU 0 maxed out

[Chris Vail]

Yes I do know what caused the system to max out, and it is a situation that no Sysadmin should ever have to deal with again....one that belongs in the 'BAD ARCHITECTURE IDEAS HALL OF SHAME".

We hired Anderson Consulting (those lovely people who brought you ENRON) now known as Accenture to write our transaction clearing house application. They chose software from a company they owned that was written in Visual Basic. They wrote a Unix wrapper for VB and put it on the 2600. Microsoft software is written for single-processor, low memory environments. When a resource becomes available in a M$ environment, the M$ OS grabs that resource and uses it. IOW: the product does not play well with others. In this case, the application grabbed every CPU, every buffer, every kilobyte of RAM, every IO channel, every controller, every ethernet card. It used so many system resources for this one application that there were no clock cycles left over to do the relatively unimportant job of operating the computer.

Every time they ran this application, the 2600 rolled over and played dead. No, it wasn't 'playing dead', it WAS dead. VB killed it. This is when I learned to put in the .rhosts back door. Of course, VB had seized every IO channel, and then complained that there was no disks! The back door let me reboot the computer and restart the database. Once they started the application, it would die again. This happened every day for a month before somebody in management finally got hit with the clue bat.

We then moved the application back to where it belonged...on a desktop system, and just ran Oracle on the 2600. All was good and happy in the world.

The moral of the story is simple: 1) NO M$ APPLICATIONS ON UNIX SYSTEMS, and 2) WHY ARE YOU PUTTING AN APPLICATION AND ITS DATABASE ON THE SAME SERVER TO BEGIN WITH?

That was in 2001 and I'm still mad about it.


Chris

[Bryan D. Quinn]

Oh man, that sucks.

I have sent a ticket to Liebert, since I know that Site Net Multi Link is spawning the java process that is suspicious. I am not sure what is going on. Maybe they will have some insight to possible issues with their software. Our box is pretty stagnate and has been for many years. We are a very conservative shop and just keep the box humming. So nothing has changed to cause this problem.

I have definitely documented your note about remsh, I will try this the next we have a hang.

Thanks for your help.

Hopefully I will get to the bottom of this soon.

-Bryan

[Torsten.]

Chris, this is exactly the reason why you need such people - nobody else can have such ideas - develop something like a framework to simulate something like a PC just to run something like a script ... ;-)