Monitor background processor activities

When checking which system processes are active in System Status, it is a good idea to maintain a list of those background processes that should always be running. If one of these processes is not running, check the sm.log file to see if there are any messages as to what caused the interruption.

The background processes can be monitored by the status monitor.

The important column in the following table is Idle time.

Idle time

Interpretation and administrative action

 > Sleep time

The process is not continuing after its sleep interval. Normally, killing and restarting the background process should resolve this issue.

00:00:00

If the idle time is exactly 00:00:00, press the Refresh button several times to see if the idle time is increasing. If not, the process is very busy or hanging.

Background processes executing the tasks specified in records of the schedule dbdict are called background schedulers. For more information, see Monitor the schedule dbdict and background schedulers.

Note The background process called “sync” is especially important for availability: It deallocates resources of other sessions when they terminate. If this process is not running, Service Manager will still run for a while, resource requests cannot be served anymore as all resources are allocated. Exactly one instance of the “sync” process should be running on each host of the Service Manager system.