Hi there --

I recently completed a scratch install of Fedora Core 14 64-bit onto a system, and while everything appears to be running properly, I noticed there are almost 300 processes running at a given time on the server.

The top command indicated there were ten-plus instances of the watchdog, migration, and ksoftirqd daemons running on the system. I am not familiar with these services, so I wanted to know what they are, and is there a need to have this many instances of each running on the system? If the answer to the latter question is no, will simply running the kill <pid> command be sufficient to remove the excess processes? Thanks.

Listing processes with 'ps' where a process' argv[0] is in brackets ([watchdog/n], [watchdog/n], [scsi_eh_n] etc, etc) are kernel threads (this has been dealt with in other threads: search LQ?). So unless one or more of those kernel threads consistently contribute to a high system load they don't need investigating. If you want simple performance indicators wrt what bottlenecks userland processes encounter use SAR tools (iostat, vmstat etc), atop, dstat, collectl and such.

These are per cpu kernel threads. If you 16 CPUs you will get following output (see thread numbers from 0 to 15)

# ps aux | grep migration
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:27 [migration/0]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 1:07 [migration/1]
root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:38 [migration/2]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:22 [migration/3]
root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:23 [migration/4]
root 17 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:06 [migration/5]
root 20 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:01 [migration/6]
root 23 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:01 [migration/7]
root 26 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:04 [migration/8]
root 29 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:29 [migration/9]
root 32 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:19 [migration/10]
root 35 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:12 [migration/11]
root 38 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:09 [migration/12]
root 41 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:19 [migration/13]
root 44 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:16 [migration/14]
root 47 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Feb22 0:09 [migration/15]

You will find similar output for ksoftirqd, watchdog and other per-cpu-kernel threads.

The problem is when you start seeing them in top eating some CPU. Are you?. That actually means you have big load on your server.