On MacOS 10.4.2, a Startup Items daemon process that I am writing for
a client occasionally shows up in Activity Monitor tagged with "not
responding". I believe this also occurred on MacOS 10.3.9. The
details for the process show one "recent hang". However, while
Activity Monitor shows "not responding", the daemon is executing as
expected, and is not hung. Exiting Activity Monitor and restarting it
removes the "not responding" tag, so it looks like Activity Monitor
saw what it considered a hang at some point and even though the
process responded after that point, Activity Monitor did not clear
the "not responding" status.
Looking at the process using top and ps I see nothing out of the
ordinary. Client applications that talk to this daemon via TCP/IP
continue to function and report no problems, and the daemon itself,
which is monitoring devices on the network using TCP/IP, continues to
monitor them as expected. CPU usage is low (2 to 3%), there doesn't
appear to be any memory leaks, and the daemon process responds to
SIGTERM and SIGHUP signals which it uses for graceful shutdown and
restart.
The daemon is using some of my client's cross-platform libraries that
are based on ZThread-2.3.2, with a Carbon-based wrapper. The wrapper
invokes the low-level libraries, and also monitors system power
states using the IOManager and handles signals via standard signal
handlers. Depending on the number of network devices being monitored
by the daemon there can be 10 to 15 threads executing in the
process. The process also uses syslog every two seconds or so for
debugging messages.
Cocoa-based GUI client applications that talk to this daemon are also
using these cross-platform libraries and multiple ZThreads, but have
never been tagged in Activity Monitor as "not responding".
I've searched the mailing list archives and the Internet in general
for references to Activity Monitor and "not responding" and "recent
hangs", and have also searched man pages for some clue as to what is
going on. I haven't found a definition of what specific process event
or state is reflected by these labels in Activity Monitor.
My question is: what are Activity Monitor's definitions of "not
responding" and "recent hangs"?
Thanks,
Merle F. McClelland
Encad, Inc
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