Linux System Accounting Tips
Tips for sites using traditional Linux accounting
Although Resource Utilization Reporting (RUR) is the Cray-specific (and recommended) administrator tool for gathering statistics on how system resources are being used by applications or jobs, some site may choose to run traditional Linux accounting. This topic is a venue for sharing tips or tricks that Cray is aware of related to running Linux accounting on an XC Series system.
Linux Accounting on Service Nodes
Linux process accounting is not enabled by default on Cray service or compute nodes. If a site chooses to enable process accounting, the Linux kernel writes a process accounting record at each process exit. These records are written into a pacct binary data file (e.g., /var/log/pacct). When /var is mounted from the Cray boot RAID, the /var/log/pacct file writes can result in a heavy I/O load, which may cause issues with other accesses to files and directories on the boot RAID, including node crashes.
- the pacct file location is defined to be within a node local directory
- The pacct file is regularly switched to a new pacct file through ckpacct so that the prior local, non-persistent pacct file can be copied to a persistent location