We are trying to port our application (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor) to OSX
10.4 and are having trouble finding an alternative to task_for_pid() and
task_info(). Condor uses the information provided by these to keep track of
processes running on the execution nodes. On Linux, Solaris, and other
systems, we usually retrieve this information from /proc.
I have been able to get almost all the information we need out of kinfo_proc
returned from sysctl except for memory usage. Others have recommended that
one pipes in the process information from 'ps':
http://lists.apple.com/archives/unix-porting/2006/Jan/msg00093.html
This is not a viable option because we there may be many processes spawned by
a job and we will be calling this section of the code many times a minute.
Calling 'ps' is significantly slower than accessing the internal data
structures. In a simple test of 10,000 unique process lookups, using
task_for_pid() is almost instantenous while 'ps' takes a full minute.
Note that this problem only occurs when the application's daemons are not run
with root privileges. The system works fine when running as root, since we
have the appropriate privileges to execute task_for_pid().
Is there a better/faster way to get process information in the new Intel OSX,
in particular the image size and the resident set size, without using 'ps'?
Or should we just tell our users to install our software and make sure that
the appropriate user for the system is added to the procmod group?
--
Andy Pavlo
email@hidden
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