Dear Experts,

We had a performance issue earlier and it seemed that someone had resolved it by killing some Java process and the application started working again. But they wouldn't tell us what Java process they killed.

Had tried to grep it from history and got the OS PID's. However, would appreciate if someone can help me if I can check anywhere for the details as to what process was running with the PID which was killed.

Checked /var/log/messages and could not find any details.


OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6 (Santiago)
Linux 2.6.32-504.12.2.el6.x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux



Warm Regards,
Vikram.

The pid won't be much use unless you also have the pacct (accounting) files from the same period. You could lookup the pid there and identify the recorded name (which doesn't HAVE to be accurate -and it may be truncated if really long).

You would need the BSD process accounting feature enabled for kernel plus GNU acct package installed. If you need more you can use the libaudit/audit.

Java is typically a more troublesome application to debug at that level, the PID itself would not give you the details you are needing. It has been some time since I needed to do this myself and I do not have a Java machine but if I remember correctly the procedure ran something like, locate the PID of the offending Java fork causing the error. So for example if the proc id is 1234 then look at the /proc/1234/maps file and inside the /proc/1234/map_files/ directory. That or run lsof and search for the process.