Messages

1

ProcessTamer / Re: New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 28, 2007, 05:43 PM »

Well, the issue is that under normal traffic, I get around 5-15 clamscans running at same time. Then when one of the instances of clamscan messes up, the clamscans stack up and goes to 30-up to 180 one time I saw.

I know it won't help with the I/O that much but by being able to watch to see if there is a rogue process, then this would curb the heavy I/O.

I am trying to avoid the purchase of their anti-virus plugin but it seems that I won't be able to avoid it unless Process Tamer incorporates the CPU time watcher too.

The Clamscan randomly bogs up. There is no pattern to when it bogs up.  Sometimes it works for days, sometimes just a few hours.  Right now, I have it set to no more than 30 scan sessions yet if clamscan ends up in that endless loop, my mailserver self crashes itself and resets after 1 minute.  However, the clamscan process is still running in the background at 100% CPU along with other dead clamscans from the previous mail server crash.

Now you see why this is necessary to monitor the CPU Time.
It is a security measure to ensure that my server does not become unresponsive.

2

ProcessTamer / Re: New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 28, 2007, 01:54 PM »

It sounds weird that it pegs down the CPU even if you run the task as low priority, are you sure that the priority setting works, that clamscam doesn't increase it's own priority manually, and that it doesn't start any child process with normal/higher priority?

Clamscan starts off with normal priority then Process tamer sends it to low priority and it does not spawn any additional child processes.  What eventually happens is the Memory gets chewed up, then the server runs 1000 times slower cause it is now paging to the hard drive.   For each instance of Clamscan, it has to read the virus database, then scan through the file to be scanned.  When you got 30-50 of these processes, you can see how it can snowball.

Could it be possible that process tamer did not have enough time to capture the process and switch the priority?

3

ProcessTamer / Re: New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 27, 2007, 10:17 AM »

I am talking about CLAMSCAN.EXE from www.clamwin.com.  This is a command line executable that is most probably a 32-bit program.
When Clamscan.exe ends up locking up (no clue why cause it is executed via a shell command from our mail server and is not interactive) it ends up sucking up CPU usage.

This is why I would like to see 2 more columns to monitor CPU Time of a process and if it exceeds this time to issue a forced kill command.  I currently have it run at lowest priority but still it ends up overwhelming the system. 

Otherwise, I try to remotely log into the server (which never works cause the CPU is nailed to 100%) and have to travel to my outsourced co-location facility which charges me per visit when it is off peak hours (Free during peak hours).  This is why I would like to see Process tamer to monitor the CPU Time as well since you need to tame that as well for a process and kill it if it ends up being a rogue process, which in this case it is acting like one.

4

ProcessTamer / Re: New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 22, 2007, 01:49 PM »

So, will the Process time watcher be added into this program?  If it does, I got $100 donation flying your way.

Just need to add CPU Time monitoring for a process and this will help us manage those pesky dos prompt executables that run rampant without being near the computer to deal with it.  Looks like my software vendor does not want to further fix the problem cause he says to use the Avast plugin version which I do not want to pay the premium for.

All that needs to be added is a new 2 new columns which will set "max cpu time" and "action for exceeding cpu time"

If Max CPU time is at 0:00:00 then it would ignore this setting.
Any other setting would then look at the action for exceeding CPU time.

Action for Exceeding CPU Time should have the following features:
Force Kill
Force Kill then Restart (Services only) "For services that get problematic after running for x amount of days..."
Ignore

5

ProcessTamer / Re: New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 13, 2007, 08:56 PM »

Nope that does not help me out since it happens on multiple instances.
This is where Process Tamer would need to manage it.  By querying the process CPU usage time.

6

ProcessTamer / New Feature: Process Time Watcher and Killer.

« on: November 13, 2007, 04:23 PM »

Hello,

I would like to first commend on the excellent program you have here however I still get some ptgui errors.

I have noticed a really important feature that is missing for this program which should be incorporated into Process Tamer.
How about a timeout period for a specific program name to not allow it run more than X amount of minutes.

Example:
I have a virus scan that runs via command line and should terminate within 120 seconds.  The program that spawns this virus scan can not properly terminate the program and leaves it hanging running at full tilt.  I would like to be able to select the program name and set a max CPU time per instance.  Now if it sees that one of the instances is running over the set X amount of seconds/Minutes/hours/days eg: 120 seconds of CPU time, then I would have process tamer kill the instance of the program. 

I hope something like this can be added.

Thanks.