Clean up Processes Left Behind by Completed Jobs

Some third-party software has a tendency to spawn child processes but do not ensure that they are cleaned up once the main process ends. This behavior can lead to overloaded, and in extreme cases, unresponsive hosts. Accelerator can be configured to enable automatic cleanup of such processes. This functionality is supported on Linux only.
Note: While automated cleanup is an effective strategy for combating this problem, the behavior should not be considered as normal, and it is recommended to report it to the third-party software vendor when it is encountered.
If enabled, for each job that has ended, the vovtasker will parse the environment metadata for each process that exists on the host. If the VOV_JOBID environment variable exists in the environment for a process, and its value matches that of the job that has ended, the process will be marked as an orphan process that must be cleaned up. Since child processes inherit their parent's environment, the vovtasker will be able to identify related child processes hierarchically. Once all orphan processes have been identified, the vovtasker will send the KILL signal to each one and will print a corresponding message in the tasker log.
Note: Processes that create their own environment from scratch, as well as ones that explicitly remove the VOV_JOBID variable from the environment will not be cleaned up by this feature.
  1. To enable this feature, add the following line to the $SWD/policy.tcl file: 
    set config(tasker.childProcessCleanup) 1
  2. Once the file has been edited, reread the policy via: 
    % nc cmd vovproject reread
  3. To confirm the feature is enabled: 
    % nc cmd vovselect param.tasker.childProcessCleanup from server
    A value of 0 indicates the feature is disabled (default), whereas a value of 1 indicates the feature is enabled.