On Fri, Jun 04, 1999 at 10:45:45PM -0400, "David A. Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> This illustrates the importance of getting permission before running
> processor-intensive programs on machines that are not entirely your own.
> There are only about thirty people logged in on the machine that I'm using
> right now, and as usual almost all of them are running Pine; even with
> this comparatively light load the slowdown was apparently bad enough to be
> a problem. I suspect that people trying to run Seti on these machines at a
> peak time of year would create a big performance drag, and force the
> administrators to monitor individual users' processor usage more closely
> to prevent such abuses. It is easy to forget about such consequences in
> the quest for CPU time.
Each instance of setiathome (or any other process which tries to get all of
the CPU) will add 1 to the load average. Sendmail and other mail systems
generally have a default load at which they will stop processing incoming
email - if the system is processing incoming email, this could be an issue.
Other server apps may behave similarly, or additional load may just be setting
off system monitors that warn about high load, even though there's no actual
degredation of performance.
Regardless, running anything on any machine you're not responible for without
consent is asking for trouble.
Bryan
--
Bryan Fullerton http://www.samurai.com/
Core Competency
Samurai Consulting
"No, we don't do seppuku." Can you feel the Ohmu call?
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