oninit question

I have an oninit process (pid #20895) which has been running since we upgraded our informix in january. This process appears to have spawned off a number of additional oninit processes, all of which are running with the '-s' flag (see below). While we are actually in online mode, the '-s' flag seems to indicate that we are in quiescent mode. Are all of these processes necessary, and if not, can I safely kill them off? What started all of them? They are starting to accumulate some major cpu time. tia, david landeen csh> ps -ef |grep oninit root 4315 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 01:14:29 oninit -s root 11888 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 02:38:48 oninit -s root 18024 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 2:27.03 oninit -s root 18210 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 38:00.36 oninit -s root 19608 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 56:51.50 oninit -s root 20895 1 13.6 Jan 12 ?? 5-03:42:06 oninit -s root 22155 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 2:59.53 oninit -s root 22936 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 37:46.94 oninit -s root 23700 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 43:58.45 oninit -s root 24828 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 40:29.75 oninit -s root 28913 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 14:21.23 oninit -s root 29627 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 01:07:07 oninit -s root 31757 20895 0.0 Jan 12 ?? 39:39.10 oninit -s