Spotlight on DB2 6.9.3

Unix expects a parent process to acknowledge the termination of any child process. If it fails to do so, the terminated child process is classified by the kernel as a zombie.

A high number of zombie processes indicates that one or more processes are not handling their child processes properly. You may need to kill the parent process to eliminate its zombie child process.

To open the Zombies page

Select the Spotlight on Unix connection in the Spotlight Browser.
Click Processes | Zombies.

For each process, you can view the information that follows:

Column	Description
PID	The process identifier for the specified process.
PPID	The process identifier for the process that is the parent of the specified process.
UID	The user identifier for the user to whom the process belongs.
State	Z for Zombie. That is, the process has been terminated and the parent process is no longer waiting.
Priority	The basic priority assigned to the process – the lower the number, the higher the priority.
Nice	The Nice value describes the relative priority of the specified process. A process with a low Nice value is running at a higher priority than a process with a high Nice value.
CPU Utilization	A value representing the amount of CPU time used by the process. The metric used here may differ across Unix implementations.
Terminal	The Unix terminal session where a user started the specified process. If the process was not started by an interactive user, the Terminal value is set to "?".
Command	The command executed by the process.

Services page

The Services page lists (by name) the popular services found in the /etc/services file of the Unix machine. These services may or may not be enabled.

To open the Services page

Select the Spotlight on Unix connection in the Spotlight Browser.
Click Processes | Services.

The Services table contains the following information.

Column	Description
Service name	The name of the specified service.
Port number	The logical port used by the service to handle data.
Protocol	The transfer protocol used by the service. Possible protocols include TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol).
Aliases	Alternative names for the service.
Active?	The status of the port used by the service (initially blank). To display the status, right-click on a service in the table and select Test port. Possible values are: Yes - A process on the server is listening on that port. No - There is no process listening on that port. Connecting... - Spotlight is waiting for a response from the server.

Activity Summary

Spotlight is powerful diagnostic and problem-resolution tool for Unix and Linux operating systems. Its unique user interface provides you with an intuitive, visual representation of the activity on your host machine.

For information on Spotlight on Unix, see these sections

Section	Description
Background Information	Introductory material to Spotlight on Unix.
Connect to a Unix System	Create / Modify / Delete connections to Unix systems.
Home Page	The Spotlight home page shows the flow of information and commands between various sub-components and the size and status of internal resources such as processes, disk files and memory structures.
Alarms	Spotlight alerts you to problems with your system by issuing an alarm. You can configure Spotlight in the level of severity that constitutes an alarm, to disable an alarm, and the actions Spotlight takes on raising the alarm.
Drilldowns	When you have isolated a problem, you can display a drilldown page, whose charts and tables provide a detailed breakdown of the underlying statistics.
View \| Options	Customize Spotlight.
Troubleshooting	Solve problems using Spotlight.

For information on using Spotlight applications See

Spotlight Basics

Activity Page

The Activity page contains several charts.

To open the Activity page

Select the Spotlight on Unix connection in the Spotlight Browser.
Click Activity Summary | Activity.

Charts on the Activity page

Notes:

Every chart has a legend (list of symbols) to its right that describes the various series (line graphs) on the chart.
Click an item in the legend to highlight its series (line) in the chart. Click a second time to return the series to its normal appearance.
Move the mouse pointer over an item in the legend to view the current value for that series within the chart.

Chart

Description

CPU Utilization

The CPU Utilization chart shows the CPU activity of the host machine. If the current activity reaches levels of greater than 100 or less than 0, run vmstat(1) to determine the reason for the erroneous values.

Run Queue

The Run Queue chart shows the amount of CPU time that will be spent performing tasks. The value is expressed as a fraction.

Divide the value by the number of processors running. If the result of the calculation is greater than 1, you may need more processors.

The lines on the chart show the run queue averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes. If the value of the 1 minute line divided by the number of processors exceeds the value 1, there is merely a spike in activity. However, if the value of the 15 minute line divided by the number of processors exceeds 1, you may need more processors.

Total Disk I/O

The Total Disk I/O chart shows the total number of I/O operations for each disk and NFS server.

Network Utilization

The Network Utilization chart represents the current network activity for the machine you are diagnosing. It shows the rate at which packets are being received by the machine and are being sent by the machine.

Paging

The Paging chart shows the rate of data pages read from, and written out to, disk over time. Typically, high paging rates indicate insufficient system memory, a large number of processes, or a number of very large processes.

The unit of measure on the Y-axis is dependent on the Operating System.

Operating System	Unit of Measure
Sun Solaris	Kilobytes per second
HP-UX	Pages per second
IBM AIX	Pages per second
Linux	Kilobytes per second. Old versions of the kernel may measure in blocks per second. Refer to your Linux documentation.

Free Memory

The Free Memory chart shows the amount of available physical memory in the machine. For Solaris, this is typically a low number. If necessary, the page-stealing daemon will seek out memory pages to re-claim them.

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Recommended Solutions for Your Problem

Spotlight on DB2 6.9.3 - User Guide

Zombies Page

Services page

Activity Summary

Activity Page