Accounting for subprocesses in batch jobs

[Sebastian Bazley]

At the end of batch jobs, there is a section headed:

Accounting information:

It seems that this only includes resources used by the main process, and not sub-processes, in spite of the fact that the Job completed message is shown.

Is there any way to ensure that the sub-process resources are counted in the total?

For example:

$ run resource_hog ! adds to account info
$ pipe dir | run resource_hog ! does not

Seems like an easy way to bypass resource accounting !

[Uwe Zessin]

No, you can't bypass, because the data is in the system accounting file unless it is disabled. The accounting is per-process, not per-job, isn't it?

[Sebastian Bazley]

SUBMIT/CPU=hh:mm:ss does seem to take note of the total CPU in the job.

ACCOUNTING does show the subprocess resource usage - but only if subprocess accounting is enabled. If disabled, only the parent process usage seems to be shown.

However, if subprocess accounting is disabled, submit/cpu still works as expected.

[Uwe Zessin]

CPU limit is a job-wide quota - the OpenVMS documentation explains which quotas are pooled and which are not.

A quota is a completely different mechanism than accounting. I am fairly confident that a specified CPU limit still works, even if you completely disable accounting.

[Mike Reznak]

Hi,

it's all just a matter of security setup of wour system.
If everything is disabled, then everything is bypassed.

Mike

[John Gillings · Accepted solution]

Sebastian,

Subprocesses have their own accounting records. Assuming accounting is enabled, see the ACCOUNTING utility. You can extract the records for a process and all its subprocesss (identifiable by the Owner ID field). ACCOUNTING can add them all together and generate a report. Exact combination of qualifiers required for your specific case left as an exercise.

>SUBMIT/CPU=hh:mm:ss does seem to take
>note of the total CPU in the job.

It does, but in a kind of weird way. CPU limit for a process is a DEDUCTIBLE quota. Very strange concept. Check out the $CREPRC docs for a full explanation.