oninit process

Lic. Jorge Valenzuela

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Sep 20, 2001, 9:31:00 PM9/20/01

to

Hi, all:

When I run top command, I see oninit process that are using almost 60% of
the server. I
would like to know who is that user, but top say is informix. How can I
identifies who is really
running this process ????

Thanks in advance.

hp-ux 11.00
ids 7.3

Fernando Nunes

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Sep 20, 2001, 10:19:55 PM9/20/01

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The informix user is running that process. Informix is multi-threaded, and this means that a process can run several threads. This includes user and system threads.

That's why you can't match an oninit process to a database user. In fact that oninit process serves several users. With 'onstat -g glo' you can identify what type of virtual processor this process is running. A virtual processor is an Informix concept which defines the type of work the process will make within the database. In other words, what kind of threads it will run. In your case this should be a cpu VP which besides other things runs user threads.

To try to find which thread is consuming more resources you should use some onstat commands.

onstat -u will show you the users with most reads and writes.
onstat -g tpf will give more detailed information (isam operations, buffer reads etc.)
onstat -g act -r 1 will loop every second showing the running threads. If you consistently identify a thread always in a running state this is probably a high consuption thread.

In short: onstat is your biggest friend, but there is no magic recipe to point out which user should receive the bonus of productivity :)

Please check your documentation to learn a bit more about DSA arhitecture. It will explain all of the above much better than me.

Regards.

Scott Fendley

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Sep 20, 2001, 11:06:13 PM9/20/01

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Hola Jorge,

The oninit processes you are seeing are in esscence the Informix DataBase
engine. There are usually a handful of process that are eating CPU time
galore while a few are sitting at 1% or less.

If you want to see what is going on and have a more graphical view of the
server, I would encourage you to run the Informix Server Administrator
which is available at http://www.informix.com/evaluate/ . I have used
this to save me several times.

I am sure that some of the other Informix experts will probably jump in
and explain all the VCPU and the like involved in the oninit's. But this
is a very basic explaination of what I have seen on my server.

Scott Fendley
Systems/Security Analyst
University of Arkansas

Paul Watson

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Sep 21, 2001, 3:43:23 AM9/21/01

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The informix oninit processes do the actual work on behalf of the
users. If you need know which user it doing the 'work' then chase
through the onstat commands, onstat -u is a good start point

--
Paul Watson #
Oninit Ltd # Growing old is mandatory
Tel: +44 1436 672201 # Growing up is optional
Fax: +44 1436 678693 #
www.oninit.com #

Dirk Moolman

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Sep 21, 2001, 5:42:36 AM9/21/01

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oninit is not just one user, but all the users on your system connecting to
the database. This is all the work done by the database (sql statements,
connections, etc.) put together in one multithreaded process - the oninit.
You will have oninits for your cpuvps, also for your pollthreads (NETTTYPE)
if you are not using shared memory, for the aiovps, etc.
You can see the different oninits by running "onstat -g glo"

The best you can do is to run onstat commands to see which of your users are
doing the most selects / updates, use the most memory etc.

Hope this helps
Dirk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-inf...@iiug.org
[mailto:owner-inf...@iiug.org]On Behalf Of Lic. Jorge Valenzuela
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 3:31 AM
To: Grupo De Informix
Subject: oninit process

Hi, all:

When I run top command, I see oninit process that are using almost 60% of
the server. I
would like to know who is that user, but top say is informix. How can I
identifies who is really
running this process ????

Thanks in advance.

hp-ux 11.00
ids 7.3

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Frank Wouts

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Sep 21, 2001, 10:36:14 AM9/21/01

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Hi,

The user who is running that process is in fact user informix!
When you start the database server running 'oninit' or 'oninit -yv'
or some other variation of parameters to the oninit command,
a parent proces oninit en several child processes (according to the
amount of
virtual processors you defined) are forked of, all run by user informix!

You're welcome!

Frank.