Monitor FAQ for version 2.0
Last updated:  October 1996

Q: Are there any issues with monitor 2.1.2 and the year 2000?  (i.e. is 
   it year 2000 compliant)?   From: <LDroluk@ato.com> "Linda Droluk"
A: I believe it is 2000 compliant as far as the AIX your runnning it on is.

Q: The monitor displays some big numbers like 
   "Runnable processes -4482185767840725.00" in AIX3 with xlC 2.1.3?
A: There seems to be a bug in that version of xlC. Compile the
   monitor with -O2 flag (see the Makefile).

Q: How can I display multiprocessor information in monitor?
A: Use monitor version 1.14 or 2.08 and higher with the -smp option.

Q: Is there further documentation on different monitored variables.
A: Some information is available from my conference paper on SHARE/1994
   at ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/AIX/RS6000/monitor-paper.ps.Z
   or from http://www.csc.fi/~jmaki

Q: How can I redirect the output of monitor to a file for preprocessing?
A: Since version 2.00 you can use the -l and related options to dump
   interval (and sample) data to a logfile.
   An other way to do this interactivly is to use x-windows and copy and
   paste text region to file or editor.

Q: On IBM SP, why the css0 is showing always 0 kbyte/s transfer rates?
A: IBM/Kingston has decided that it is not worth updating the 32 bit
   network counters which are shown also by SNMP variables. The
   packet counters are however updated and thus meaningfull also with monitor.

Q: What is the process 514 which consumes much of the CPU-time?
A: It is Kernel (wait) process which is the idle loop in AIX. Wait-process
   is just the place where idle cpu-time is consumed. It is not harmfull.
   You cannot kill it. It's running in priority 127 which is the worst
   priority.

Q: I just booted my RS/6000 and why all memory is used?
A: AIX buffers all file accesses throught memory. So this is the reason
   why "all" memory seems to be used. One can look this with monitor
   in Memory part, the files shows the amount of memory that is
   used by files (actually other than text and data (procs) memory segments).
	Memory    Real     Virtual
	free      1.4 MB   42.9 MB
	procs    20.5 MB   21.1 MB
	files    10.1 MB          
	total    32.0 MB   64.0 MB

Q: What are the wierd numbers that are shown on my three digit LEDs display?
A: You are probably running older version of loadavgd or loadavgLED which 
   shows your systems load average in three digit LEDs display.

Q: Where can I find more information on how to use monitor and what
   is the meaning of all the different numbers shown by it? And how can
   I tune my system to work better?
A: At the moment there isn't any really good all explaining document on this.
   I'm working on it at my spare time. There is an IBM AIX publication
   "IBM AIX Performance tuning quide" which can help you solving some
   of the problems.

Q: How do I install monitor.
A: Assuming you are installing the binaries to /usr/local/bin
   Run as root.
       cd "directory-where-monitor-sources-are"
       make clean
       make
       ./monitor -C 1
       make install

Q: What are all these 'kproc' processes.
A: A kernel process is one that is born in the kernel, and never leaves it.
   Sort of like a never-ending system call. There's a section in Info called
   "Using Kernel Processes" that talks about them. Various AIX subsystems use
   kprocs for maintenance tasks, such as clean ups or responses to interrupts
   that don't have to be done on-level.

   Here are a few:
    wait
       AIX idle process. This one will eat all cpu if no-one else wants it :-)
    gil 
       The "gil" kproc does timer driven TCP/IP work.  As I understand it, it 
       wakes up every 200ms and every 500ms to deal with things like packet 
       retransmissions, etc.
    swapper
       AIX pager/swapper
    jfsc
       Compressed file system process
    kbio
       Kernel biod (sort of NFS...)
    netm
    lrud

