Which process make the most use of "sigprocmask" system call?

[Romaric Guilloud]

Under gpm, I see that the sigprocmask system call is HEAVILY made.
How can I figure out which process(es) make(s) these system calls (thru gpm, glance, other...)
Thanks in advance.

Romaric.

[Mark Grant]

I'm not clear on how to do this through glance etc but if you have software that is dying a lot and restarting or is using POSIX signals but using them as if they were System V signals, that could be your culprit.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Romaric,

I would use a small adviser syntax file to find out the process that is making a lot of system calls and then see if that is the process.

$cat syntax_file
PROCESS LOOP

PRINT proc_cpu_syscall_util," ", proc_proc_name

$glance -j 1 -iterations 2 -syntax proc -adviser_only > /tmp/advisor.out

$sort /tmp/advisor.out |tail -10

will show you top 10 processes w.r.to system call utilization.

-Sri

[Romaric Guilloud]

Thank you very much Sri,
Your adviser file produced the following output:
1.4 sh
2.2 ps
2.2 ps
2.2 ps
2.9 ps
7.2 glance
11.4 glance
26.8 ioconfigd
28.8 ioconfigd
14223.1 vxfsd

I'm currently facing a pure System CPU bottleneck (most of the time spent in the kernel: GBL_CPU_SYS_MODE_UTIL > 50%) and vxfsd seems therefore to be the root cause of all these system calls "sigprocmask".

Now that we've found vxfsd is involved in the bottleneck, the tricky part is determining why?
Any idea?

Thanks in advance for your valuable help.

Romaric.

[Romaric Guilloud]

Forgot to mention that my server is not doing much on the IO side, so I really wander why vxfsd consummes that much of the CPU resource?