Disable accounting selectively?

General support questions
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mathog
Posts: 258
Joined: 2008/07/09 23:52:06

Disable accounting selectively?

Post by mathog » 2018/03/29 16:45:00

A process I run spawns hundreds of thousands of subprocesses each of which runs only very briefly. Unfortunately the process accounting associated with all of this filled /var/account/pacct with a gigantic number of records, and that file grew so large, so fast, that the "/" partition filled. Of course that happened in the middle of the night. It was all downhill from there...

After figuring out where all the space went, and cleaning out the huge pacct files the root partition is happy again. But I still need to run that process more times.

What I would like to know is if there is some way to selectively disable process accounting for all subprocesses of a given process. Something more or less like:

kill -TERM -$PID

but instead for accounting purposes. Commands for turning process accounting on or off entirely have been found, but none so far for pruning it a bit.

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