runacct accounting - /usr/lib/acct/runacct process executed through cron with user "adm" can cause high CPU usage (Doc ID 2584376.1)

Last updated on JULY 07, 2023

Applies to:

Symptoms

Customer discovers user "adm" taking upwards of 54% CPU usage as shown in the following prstat output:

NPROC USERNAME  SWAP   RSS MEMORY      TIME  CPU
  207 adm        59M   56M   0.0% 115071:12  54%        <<<<<<<<<<<<<
 1131 oracle     85G   57G    23% 2226:07:3 3.2%
   93 root     1147M 1254M   0.5% 934:30:47 0.4%

Further investigation discovers that user "adm" is associated with cron and the offending processes are runacct accounting processes like the following:

  adm 17364 17363 0 Jul 19 ? 0:00 /sbin/sh /usr/lib/acct/runacct
  adm 24733 24307 1 Jul 31 ? 7615:34 acctprc
  adm 1561 1355 1 Jul 25 ? 16256:23 acctcms /var/adm/Spacct.0.0725 /var/adm/Spacct.1.0725 /var/adm/Spacct.2.0725 /v
  adm 26159 2384 0 Jun 03 ? 0:00 sh -c /usr/lib/acct/runacct 2> /var/adm/acct/nite/fd2log
  adm 21526 20801 1 Jun 09 ? 82498:07 acctcms /var/adm/Spacct.0.0609 /var/adm/Spacct.1.0609 /var/adm/Spacct.10.0609 /
  adm 26918 26582 1 Jul 23 ? 19136:38 acctprc
  adm 13827 2384 0 Jun 27 ? 0:00 sh -c /usr/lib/acct/runacct 2> /var/adm/acct/nite/fd2log
  adm 13020 12593 1 Jul 13 ? 33536:43 acctprc
  adm 505 155 1 Jun 25 ? 59456:50 acctprc

Cause

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