Sporadic mwm process consumes excessive cpu. Need to periodically kill.

[Jack C. Mahaffey]

Any ideas why the mwm process periodically stays alive and consumes cpu when it is no longer needed? I understand it has something to do with Reflections. We periodically need to kill the process to make the problem go away.

Occurs on hp-ux 11.0

[Alex Glennie]

Not sure, however you should expect to see a mwm (parent) process running all the time, it should wait until it receives an XDMCP request froman xterminal or PC client and then spawn a new child process for the remote display. When the xterminal is power cycled this will die.

Are you using mwm only or is CDE involved ? You can configure dtlogin to run mwm not dtwm is why I ask. My advise would be to install the latest Xserver and X11 Motif 2.1 patches (for hp-ux 11.xx) and if CDE involved the latest CDE patch as well.

Is it just mwm eating CPU , Parent or Child process ? and what about X ?

You may wish to try creating a file in a users $HOME directory : .Xdefaults and add the following :

*terminateServer or if CDE is behind the scenes look in /usr/dt/config/Xconfig ant the Dtlogin line TerminateServer : True ......

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

You can execute a little script from cron. the script should be like:
ee=`ps -e|grep processname|grep "?"|cut -c2-6`
kill -9 $ee
Don't use this on root process please.
Only on the identified processes ugging the system

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

You can execute a little script from cron. the script should be like:
ee=`ps -e|grep processname|grep "?"|cut -c2-6`
kill -9 $ee

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The reason behind Xwindow programs consuming large amounts of CPU are usually traced to PC Xterminal emulators...the emulators work OK but the PC often crashes and X11 does not have a consistent way to see that a display has disappeared and often goes into a loop. Also, netwokr overloads can cause disconnects with similar results.