in reply to Perl ran SETI@Home for us.

I am curious, why couldn't you just keep it always running and nice the process to like 19 or something? Wouldn't this have the desired effect?

-Fatty Lumpkin

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Re: Re: Perl ran SETI@Home for us.
by rje (Deacon) on Dec 12, 2001 at 02:16 UTC
    Ah, a discerning question.

    Well, when the equipment was running our softswitch code,
    a number of processes would be launched and design was very
    picky about what was running on the system with their
    software. So we needed to sense an uptick in resource use
    and shut down processes. This way, when errors popped
    up, they wouldn't have to worry if SETI@Home were somehow
    to blame.

    Unfortunately, when problems did pop up, they did a ps and
    saw "setirunner". In other words, we unfortunately named
    the script poorly, and it was easily picked out. We should
    have named it something unobtrusive... something vaguely
    UNIX-system-like. Ah, well.

    Rob