HPUX accounting over head ?

[Mark Killen]

We are considering turning on process accounting to collect data for a product called OpenIT. Can someone tell me in general what the over head for process accounting would be on a per cpu basis on a 80% capacity box. I know there is no formula, but others experiences and best practises are very important to prevent overload of the server. We run 3440 4 way and 5470's

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Gathering and checkpointing the accounting data puts a negligible additional load onto the system (1-3%) but the statistical scripts that run daily or weekly can have a noticeable effect so they should be scheduled to run during off-peak times. Note that these accounting records are written upon each process termination so something like a find . -exec {} could write thousands of records over a short period of time although the additional per process overhead is still small.