-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alex Brollo: We don't usually measure resource use in "pywikipedia readings/editing per hour" ;-) The most common indicators of resource use are CPU time and memory. There's also no clear point at which a job becomes "heavy" -- not least because "heavy" is a vague description and could mean different things to different people. It would be easier to answer your question if you could provide some context... - river.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alex Brollo: Yes, but it depends on operating system. If you're using a Solaris server (willow), use prstat: $ prstat -aU $LOGNAME Or on Linux (nightshade), use top: $ top -u $LOGNAME Both of these will show a list of all your processes, and various statistics, including CPU and memory use. (prstat will also show a summary of your entire resource use.) The interesting figures are CPU use and resident memory (called "RES" in top, and "RSS" in prstat). "CPU" is the amount of CPU (in percent) that your process is using. prstat shows this as total of all CPU cores, so 12.5% CPU means your process is using one entire CPU core (since the login servers have 8 cores, and 100/8=12.5). top shows this as total of a single core, so an entire core shows as 100% (and 200% would mean it was using two cores). Generally you shouldn't use 100% CPU constantly, but it's okay for a program to use a lot of CPU sometimes and sleep (using none) at other times. What is acceptable CPU use really depends on what the program does; if it makes 1 edit to the wiki per hour and does nothing else, using 10% CPU is probably excessive. On the other hand, a script that does complicated processing might easily use 25%. RES/RSS (resident memory) is the amount of RAM being used by the program. There is a hard limit of 1GB per user on each server, but most tools should use a *lot* less than that. Again, it really depends on what the tool does. You shouldn't worry too much about resource use as long as it's not excessive. We (TS admins) will let you know if you seem to be using too many resources. I usually recommend the book "Understanding UNIX" by Stan Kelly-Bootle, but unfortunately it's out of print, and it also doesn't answer this particular question. (But it does tell you just about everything else you'd want to know.) - river.