DECW$SESS Processes

[Trace Trembath]

Good morning,

When I do a finger on an OpenVMS 7.3-1 system, I see several DECW$SESS processes hanging around for several users. I know that these processes are associated with DECwindows sessions the users have open. However, when a user closes all of their windows, the DECW$SESS processes keep hanging around.

How long are these process supposed to stay around and what cleans them up? Thanks.

Regards,
Trace Trembath

[John Gillings · Accepted solution]

Trace,

To some extent this depends on how the session was started.

The DECW$SESSION process should terminate when the user exits the session. Note that's not the same as just closing all the windows, they need to close the session from the session manager. I'm not exactly sure what would happen if the X server is killed (say by rebooting a PC).

Something which might be a problem is the automatic creation of a DECW$LOGINOUT process at the end of the session. You should be able to surpress this with:

$ DEFINE DECW$LOGIN_NORESTART TRUE

in the procedure used to start the session.

Which brings us back to how the sessions are started in the first place. Some X servers provide their own mechanisms, which may have a feature of keeping a session cached for future connection. You can do it manually to experiment. For example, create a procedeure:

$ SET PROCESS/NAME="TEST DECW$SESSION"
$ DEFINE DECW$LOGIN_NORESTART TRUE
$ SET DISPLAY/CREATE/NODE=xserver/TRANSPORT=trans
$ MCR DECW$SESSION
$ EXIT

To start with, login to the host and execute this procedure interactively. If it does what you want (ie: returns to the $ prompt) then arrange for it to be executed in or rsh, or whatever other mechanism is available from your X server.

Alternatively, find the procedure used by your X server and modify it to prevent automatic restarting.