Proccount returns crazy values!

[dmz]

Hello,
I have been getting alerts on one of my systems recently about too many processes. I looked & a "ps xafw|wc -l" only returns 79 and a "ls -l /proc|wc -l" returns 120; however my zabbix proccount value is 529!

I have been trying to figure out how the agent gathers the proccount value, but any suggestions are welcome!

David

[James Wells]

Greetings,

The problem is that the current system counts each PID entry two or more times. It does this because it counts the number of times that each process name appears in the status file. At present there is no fix for this, though.

[dmz]

Greetings,

The problem is that the current system counts each PID entry two or more times. It does this because it counts the number of times that each process name appears in the status file. At present there is no fix for this, though.

Interesting. Question, which status file is the agent reading to get this value?

[James Wells]

Interesting. Question, which status file is the agent reading to get this value?

IIRC it uses /proc/<PID>/status, /proc/<PID>/stat, and /proc/<PID>/cmdline

I would have to crawl through the code again to figure out when it uses each one and why. All I remember from previous crawling was that it used all three and due to the way the 2.6 kernel works, it could double or tripple the actual number of proc count values because of it.