[Termtools] Outermost competition details

[Simon Bailey]

hi jörg,

On Dec 17, 2008, at 12:41 PM, Jörg Endrullis wrote:
> I am very sorry, but I have just killed the competition webserver.
> The problem is almost certainly with the runme script of Jambox,
> it contains a line:
>  killall -q java &> /dev/null;
> and I guess this line has killed tomcat.

please DON'T do this. if you ever have to do something similar, make  
sure you only kill your own processes, NEVER use a generic "kill  
everything for good measure" approach, this is just seriously bad  
practice. cleaning up is good, but cleaning everything is not good. :)  
(think of a user running eclipse or any other java based application  
while playing around with jambox, you kill his eclipse when he tries  
to use jambox...)

> I have this line in the script because Jambox suffers from "ghost
> processes", that is, some processes that keep running both after
> successful termination as well as when the program is killed by  
> timeout.
> (this is because Jambox starts fresh Java processes, minisat,...)
> If these processes would not be killed, they would take a significant
> amout of CPU from the other competitors.
>
> Maybe this is already taken care of by the competition running  
> software?
> Alternatively maybe we could include the killall commands into the
> competition management software, as a kind of cleanup after a tool has
> been run.

see the last lines of
http://dev.aspsimon.org/wsvn/termcompLocal/trunk/pshelper.sh

and bug #42: http://dev.aspsimon.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42

orphaned processes are killed after a timeout in the way shown in  
pshelper.sh. (by checking for any processes belonging to the executing  
user and excluding a set few). as for processes left running after a  
successful run, i would have to change the scheduler to find and kill  
orphan processes after every execution. it would a fairly trivial  
patch to:

http://dev.aspsimon.org/wsvn/termcompLocal/trunk/src/org/aspsimon/termcomp/remote/CompetitionJobExecutor.java

which i can put in late this afternoon.

> Another, unrelated question: is there a possibility to do test runs on
> self-defined sets. I would like to test around 20 examples to know
> whether Jambox runs fine on the competition server.


not yet. it's on the wishlist.

regards,
sb
--
Simon Bailey
Systems Administrator
Institut fuer Informatik
Universitaet Innsbruck
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