License Counting

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 02:47:17PM -0500, Nancy Palmquist via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> Using "ps" to get a process count will tell you very little if
> starting *clerk or *report from a SYSTEM command does not count
> against the license.  You have no way of telling those occurrences
> from the regular sessions.  If you know the system well enough to
> exclude those possibilities, you might be close.  But any count
> using ps is a snapshot at one point in time.  On a *nix system, some
> things can run so fast you may never see them.  We tried to see a
> more granular count to try to see how our users were hitting the
> system and it was impossible to be too exact.

There's a way to tell.  You use the correct flags for `ps` and trace the
PPID for every one you find.  It's still only a snapshot, but it's the best
you'll get without figuring out how to monitor the shared memory segment
they use for licensing.

> I have  many hits per second at times and by the time I run a script
> to do a count, many more have started and finished also.  To do
> better than that, requires a process that uses up all the CPU time.
> Not worth it.

Actually, that may not be true.  I have an idea of how it -might- be
possible to track with an inode watching program, but without research I
can't verify how reliable it would be.  Surely not worth the time.

> We have found that a CGI interface with a 16 user license can handle
> 150,000+ requests a day on a Linux system.  That was a random day I

s/a CGI interface/a well-written CGI interface/

OneGate shields you from overflows, at the expense of slight delays.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.