RFR 9: 8077350 Process API Updates Implementation Review (original) (raw)

Roger Riggs Roger.Riggs at Oracle.com
Thu May 7 14:11:48 UTC 2015


fyi, with respect to using the start time to uniquely identify a process.

It turns out that on Linux[1] looking at st_mtime from stat(/proc/pid/status) doesn't always produce the same value (and the inode number can change). When spawning large number of processes (< 500) it appears the pseudo inode entries are not kept around and are re-initialized.

In a brief peek at the Linux code in fs/proc/inode.c it appears always to initialize st_mtime/st_atime/st_ctime from the current time. It seems a slightly more expensive read and parse of the file will be needed to get and check the start time.

fyi, Roger

[1] Ubuntu 14.04. (Linux-3.13.0) sources

On 4/17/2015 4:05 AM, Peter Levart wrote:

At least on Linux (/proc//stat) and Solaris (/proc//status) it is not necessary to open those special files and read them. Just doing stat() on them and using the stmtime will get you the process start time. I see AIX shares native code with Linux (unix), so perhaps AIX does the same. Mac OSX and Windows have special calls...



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