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CS4440 Project 1 - urgent

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jthomas Posts: 4	Posted 12:08 Mar 02, 2017 \| We have server problems with about 90 students creating new processes. Please do not execute any program or project that creates new processes with fork on the server. Do the project without the fork. When you submit the source code, submit the complete project. I will verify if your project works. From our Information Technology Consultant: " The cs1.calstatela.edu server has been going down these past couple of days. It seems to happen right after students from your CS4440 login and run some programs. I checked a few of the home directories and I see c++ programs and some fork.c programs, if your students are forking multiple processes and they did not write their code correctly they may be eating up all of the system’s resources and what ends up happening is that there are no more resources to receive SSH login requests and then no one can login. Perhaps students can practice these kinds of things on their own computers. Unfortunately there are other classes that use CS1 server so we can’t have it going offline. Please talk with your students and avoid any programming assignments that may eat up the system’s resources if the students do not write the code correctly. They can also keep track of their processes using built-in system utilities such as “top” to see how much resources their processes are using up." "My recommendation would be for them to install a virtual linux system (www.virtualbox.com, and www.ubuntu.com) on their personal computer or install something like cygwin (https://cygwin.com/install.html) . Mac users should be able to run these shell scripts on their systems since OS X sits on top of UNIX operating system. It may also be something bad in their code that makes it a runaway process that keeps on spawning new processes. I tried running just one fork2.c program from one of the accounts and just that one program killed the server within less than a minute and I had to reboot it." Last edited by jthomas at 12:08 Mar 03, 2017.

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jthomas

Posts: 4

Posted 12:08 Mar 02, 2017 |

We have server problems with about 90 students creating new processes. Please do not execute any program or project that creates new processes with fork on the server. Do the project without the fork. When you submit the source code, submit the complete project. I will verify if your project works.

From our Information Technology Consultant:

" The cs1.calstatela.edu server has been going down these past couple of days. It seems to happen right after students from your CS4440 login and run some programs.

I checked a few of the home directories and I see c++ programs and some fork.c programs, if your students are forking multiple processes and they did not write their code correctly they may be eating up all of the system’s resources and what ends up happening is that there are no more resources to receive

SSH login requests and then no one can login. Perhaps students can practice these kinds of things on their own computers.

Unfortunately there are other classes that use CS1 server so we can’t have it going offline.

Please talk with your students and avoid any programming assignments that may eat up the system’s resources if the students do not write the code correctly. They can also keep track of their processes using built-in system utilities such as “top” to see how much resources their processes are using up."

"My recommendation would be for them to install a virtual linux system (www.virtualbox.com, and www.ubuntu.com) on their personal computer or install something like cygwin (https://cygwin.com/install.html) .

Mac users should be able to run these shell scripts on their systems since OS X sits on top of UNIX operating system.

It may also be something bad in their code that makes it a runaway process that keeps on spawning new processes.

I tried running just one fork2.c program from one of the accounts and just that one program killed the server within less than a minute and I had to reboot it."

Last edited by jthomas at 12:08 Mar 03, 2017.