lsof takes long time ,

[Shabahang]

Hello ,
I am using lsof for monitoring purposes.
once its executed , it takes about 2 min , whether Its on / , /var , a tiny sub Dir, or even a file .
is it normal ?
how can I reduce the load of lsof. it takes 99% of a core for 2 min !!!

[Dennis Handly]

lsof must look at all processes' open files to determine what is being used. Don't expect it to be fast, that's not its purpose.

What is it that you are monitoring?

[Patrick Wallek]

What is the exact 'lsof' command you are running?

If you are just running 'lsof' without any arguments, then it could take a while because it is looking at all processes.

Adding some options to narrow the scope of what lsof is looking at/for could help you.

[Dennis Handly]

>Patrick: Adding some options to narrow the scope

Right, either to look at specific PIDs or to exclude others.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Could be getting confused, but I thought I read somewhere that lsof was effected by the same problem that fuser had recently... se this thread:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Administration/fuser-uses-too-much-CPU/m-p/4606069#M376266

HTH

Duncan

[Dennis Handly]

>Duncan: I read somewhere that lsof was effected by the same problem that fuser had recently

It depends. (The memory leak was in dld.sl) That was for PA only. If you could get lsof to skip looking at memory regions, that might help. Looking for mapped files requires looking at memory regions.