Re: oninit processes

Steve Young wrote: > > I am the Informix DBA in a shop having an Informix ODS 7.13.UC1 > installation. Our unix administrator sees the Informix engine as several > (12) oninit processes which run as owned by the superuser. The unix > admin asks the following questions: > > 1. Should the oninit processes be owned by superuser (root), or > should they instead be owned by the informix user? > Was Informix installed correctly? > > 2. Why do two of the oninit processes appear to take up most of the > system resources? They do not appear to yield cpu time to other > oninit processes. Is this correct? This is all normal. The oninit's run as root to get root priveleges, this is OK and safe. You can start the engine as Informix, but since the executable is, and must be, owned by root and suid it runs with the same permissions. The oninit processes which contain the CPUVPs get most of the CPU time, you may have only two or if more then you have not stressed these two sufficiently that they could not handle the existing requests so that the remaining CPUVPs have done little work. The remaining oninit processes are listeners, shared memory and buffer managers, page cleaners, Asychronous I/O VPs, log activity VPs, etc which get a much smaller workout than the CPU VPs and anyway do much more I/O and system call activity than CPU activity anyway. Art S. Kagel