[hobbit] TOP & Memory Test

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 02:09:55PM -0600, James Wade wrote:
> When you look at the cpu test, it shows top output
> for the processes taking up the most cpu.
> 
> Can the same be done for the Memory Test, but
> showing top information of the processes taking
> up the most memory?

I think it's a great idea. It would take some coding in the memory
handling module, but the hobbit clients do report enough data from most
Unix systems that it should be possible to parse out the memory 
utilisation and generate a listing like the "top" display on the cpu 
column.

A quick grep on the hobbitclient-*.sh scripts indicate that we do get
the "%memory" used from AIX, Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and
SunOS/Solaris, but not from HP-UX, Irix, OSF/1 and SCO. 

When we have this info, we should also make it possible to trigger
alerts for processes that gobble up too much memory, or too much CPU
time. So I would probably use this as an opportunity to actually grab
some more info from the "ps" listing than what we do today, and hook up
a couple of new threshold settings for it. I've already had requests for
this type of alerting.

Tracking CPU/Memory utilisation by process in a graph would probably
also be interesting in some cases (eg to see when processes are leaking
memory).


Henrik