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mrjwalsh

Member

Registered: 2007-01-08

Posts: 52

unknown ps should I have these running?

Hi all,
I don't like not knowing what's running on my machine so the other day I worked out what 90% of the ps running in the background actually do; very useful Just wanted to clarify if the following should be running or this many instances should be?

kio_http: the instances of this do not relate to how many windows of konqueror i have running, in one instance i had one window open with around 30 of these running, is that normal?

kdm: I have two of these running? one from command /opt/kde/bin/kdm the other from -:0 ?? I thought i only needed one...

run-mozilla.sh - i have this running even when firefox isn't running, though thunderbird is however i also have...

thunderbird-bin - i have this running aswell as the actual thunderbird program? why do both mozilla applications seem to need two parts to run?

and lastly.
scsi_eh_x - I have four of these, I know they're a hardware level operation but from the naming system are they to do with scsi? which i definitely don't have on my system

Thanks to everyone in advance.

toofishes

Developer

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-06-06

Posts: 602

Website

Re: unknown ps should I have these running?

I'll cover what I know and leave the rest to others.

kdm: I have two of these running? one from command /opt/kde/bin/kdm the other from -:0 ?? I thought i only needed one...

This is probably due to kdm forking at some point. Because Linux implements threads as more or less additional processes, you get this sometimes. Try running ps -ef. You will see a column marked PPID, which stands for parent process ID. I would guess one of the kdm processes is forked from the other.

run-mozilla.sh - i have this running even when firefox isn't running, though thunderbird is however i also have...

thunderbird-bin - i have this running aswell as the actual thunderbird program? why do both mozilla applications seem to need two parts to run?

Mozilla apps use shell scripts to make sure everything is all set up before they run, and that is what you are seeing here. Don't get too worked up over numbers of processes- if you look at the time spent on run-mozilla.sh, you'll see that it is probably next to nothing.

lloeki

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-20

Posts: 456

Website

Re: unknown ps should I have these running?

kio_http: the instances of this do not relate to how many windows of konqueror i have running, in one instance i had one window open with around 30 of these running, is that normal?

I guess each one is there for a corresponding http request. like:
- you type an address/click a link
- konq sends a GET, one kio_http comes in
- konq receives html content from server
- konq parses content, sends a GET for each 'embedded' content (e.g css sheets, images, flash, etc...) [*]
- konq  has all content, and displays the page

maybe konq does the [*] step parallelly, so this results in one kio_http per request, and improved throughput. so, 30 images => 30 kio_http

scsi_eh_x

do you have SATA disks, or usb storage devices?
FWIW, 'eh' seems to stand for error handling: http://www.andante.org/scsi_eh.html

Last edited by lloeki (2007-03-07 14:55:23)

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mrjwalsh

Member

Registered: 2007-01-08

Posts: 52

Re: unknown ps should I have these running?

i have one sata drive with 4 partitions, including my swap one; Im guessing these relate to those, the SCSI naming convention confuses me though.