🚀 go-pugleaf

Tony Schreiner wrote:
> 
> I, as well many other people, have recently become disgruntled about
> what may be some misuse of computing resources.  I've resisted
> complaining about this for a while now.

I agree, performance on the top machines has been poor at best recently.

> 
> While we have quotas and dial-up limits, there doesn't seem to be much
> preventing a few users from bringing one of the most important
> resources of the CS department to its knees.
> 
> More specifically, I'm talking about students running large
> CPU-intensive processes across the department's best machines 24 hours
> a day, 7 days a week, for weeks at a time.  I am _NOT_ talking about
> opening up a few copies of Netscape, Rational Rose, or whatever on
> somebody else's machine.

Isn't there a way to limit the amount a CPU time a user can take?

> 
> One recent example is someone has been almost continuously using many
> of the better CS workstations to crack an RSA encryption key as part
> of a challenge that some internet users have taken an interest in.  Is
> *that* a worthy use of our departments scarce resources?

I don't mind this as long as those process are set to immediatly quite
hogging the system resources once it's apparent that there are active
user logged on!


> 
> As another example, some grad students have been running large
> processes across many of the same machines for 24/7 for at least a
> week ("src*******").  Who knows what they are doing.

This is really obnoxious since there are RESEARCH machines in the CS sub
domain that are there specifically for graduate students to do there
work on!!  We poor undergrads can't even LOG ON to these machines, much
less use up all of the available resources.

> 
> These people don't even bother to use "nice" to reduce the priority of
> their processes.

You may argue that if we are bothered by the use of system resources, 
then we should approach the offenders directly.  I submit that we
shouldn't even have to approach you since it's only common courtesy not
to monopolize limited resources that are used by everyone in the
department.

I have to agree with Tony completely.  If I want to do graduate research
or participate in a cool contest or just run a process that thrashes
just for fun, I'd at least try to set it up so that I didn't interfere
with users who are working on the systems I'm using.

cheers
--
Corby