Assessing external processes

Excessive, ill-timed, unnecessary, and runaway external processes can have a negative effect on system resources. When external processes coincide with the appearance of load-related alarms, that is a definite indication of a problem.

Excessive external processes

System resources may be affected by:

• Excessive use of call data event tracking
• Excessive requests to the 3270 host interface
• Reading of large (more than 500 records) database tables that are not indexed
• Reading and writing an excessive number of records to database tables
• Use of the system monitor program with a fast refresh rate (anything less than the default rate of 5 seconds)

Ill-timed external processes

System resources may be affected by:

• Use of the voice response application generator on a production machine during peak load hours
• Requests for call data reports during peak load periods
• Performance of operation, administration, and maintenance functions, such as backups and speech administration
• Text-to-fax conversions
• Unnecessary system cron jobs running during operations hours

Note:
Every day at 12:15 a.m. all call data is summarized. If this coincides with voice processing activity, even low activity, alarms may be reported.

Unnecessary external processes

Certain external processes can be terminated if they are not providing a service to the voice response application. See the table that follows.

Runaway and system-intensive processes

Check processes in these ways:

• If the sar(1m) command consistently shows 0 percent idle time, it is likely that a process is in an infinite loop. The process can be identified with ps(1m) by examining the change in its CPU time and run status. If it is a system process, contact a service representative. If it is a user process, repair as required.
• The command /usr/ucb/ps_-aux|head identifies the leading CPU-intensive process.
• The top command identifies the process currently running.

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