Day 13 #90DaysOFDevops

For day 13, i dived into the world of process management on linux. A linux system has hundreds or maybe even thousands of processes running simultaneously.

i learnt how to view processes by using the ps & ps aux command. The ps command doesn’t provide much information. When ran without any options it lists the processes started by the currently logged user. This feature isn’t good enough and thats where the ps aux command comes in.

When ran, the ps aux command will show all the processes running on the sytem for all users. The first process is usually init while the last process is the command ran to display, ps aux.

They are several processes that use the most resources on a sytem. To view these resource-hungry resources, the top command is deployed. This brings out all the processes ordered by resources used, starting with the largest.

Now the priority of a process can be changed by using the nice command.The values range from -20 to +19 with zero the deafault value. A high nice value means low priority and a low nice value means high priority. By the way, there is also a renice command. The commands are slightly different and can be confusing. The nice command requires you increase the nice value while the renice command wants an absolute value for niceness. e.g nice -n -10 /bin/newfile increases the nice value by -10,increasing its priority and allocating more resources. renice 20 6666(PID of the file) sets the absolute value to 20.

Lastly, i learnt how to schedule processes using the at command.

Managing processes is a very important skill for every linux user. I tried my hands on everything stated above and also killed resource-hungry processes. Side note: i finally got around using a text editor while working on the terminal. i learnt how to use nano.

Cheers to day 13 and cheers to many more days!