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From: info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.info-vax
Subject: Re: Removing inactive users
Message-ID: <7658@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 31-May-85 14:55:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7658
Posted: Fri May 31 14:55:05 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Jun-85 02:34:53 EDT
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Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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From: Gail Rubin <grubin@bbn-spca>

There are reasons for deleting the processes of inactive users.
1) For sites where accounting is done that includes connect time, and
where projects want to minimize their charges, it is useful to kill
processes of people who aren't doing anything to decrease the amount
of time they get charged for.

2) If you have set the maximum number of processes to prevent your system
getting too loaded, someone just sitting there is occupying a process slot
that could be used by someone else. You might answer, 'well, just increase
the max number of processes'; that affects how big your page and swap files
have to be so that isn't necessarily a good idea.

I imagine there are other reasons; these are just the ones I know of and
they are the reasons we sometimes use a 'killer' program here.

-- Gail Rubin
(grubin@bbn-spca or @bbn-unix)