There are several tools available on our servers to monitor resource utilization. The most commonly used utility is top. top gives you a running snapshot of a number of different metrics on a server. In this article we highlight important metrics for you to watch for to ensure you share resources responsibly, and don't run afoul of our policies.
The application servers I recently discussed are available to any account holder, without any restrictions: log in, use any program, and consume as many resources as you want. We also run some private servers, restricted to certain subsets of users, which also have no usage limit. Even though this works fairly well in practice, with everyone playing nice and getting their work done, we sometimes encounter situations where a single person is in a hurry to get something finished, and tries to do too much. Overuse by one can cause performance degradation for everyone else and may even crash the server. By knowing what to watch for you can help avoid such a situation.
What we call "application servers" are large capacity Linux servers running mathematical and statistical software. We started operating these servers many years ago when most of you only had access to low-powered desktop computers that were not very useful for intensive computational tasks. These days, a lot of you have computers that are many times more powerful than servers were ten years ago.
Last week, we described how you authenticate and use our servers using the LDAP system. In this post we will talk about access for your colleagues who are not part of CLA.
