One of my users have done a cron job associated with LYNX, not sure what he was doing and LYNX itself took 95% of the CPU power.....:bawling:

I mean LYNX is a text based web browser, how can it use so much resources.....

Do you guys think

chmod o=-x /usr/bin/lynx will do the job?

Or you could just ask that customer to stop using lynx in his cron script and keep it for all your other customers.

I suggest you disable it for users, because many of them abuse the fast connection of the server.

Lynx should not use 95% of the CPU. Netscape doesn't even do that. Check if it's really lynx or a program renamed 'lynx'.

His account may be hacked.

The thing is that after I set lynx to root users only, it went back to normal.....

I found that it was a cron tab calling the lynx to view a db of his and thats it.

2 cron tabs:

called to start at 5AM everyday,

-lynx http://url.to/hisdatabase.db

Well

About a million year ago, when I was in University, I learnt that Lynx can't be called as a cron job. Well, I didn't really learn this. I learnt that it needs output to the terminal in order to run. Again, maybe I learnt wrong...:(

ps: for example, try to ctrl+z a lynx session and then put it in the background. I think it will stop. Can't run.

lynx does not always require user input.. just do a 'man lynx' and you'll see many options that don't need an interactive session to be useful.

want to dump and webpage to a file? lynx -source http://yourwebsite.com > file

Chris

Originally posted by nikolas
Well

About a million year ago, when I was in University, I learnt that Lynx can't be called as a cron job. Well, I didn't really learn this. I learnt that it needs output to the terminal in order to run. Again, maybe I learnt wrong...:(


lynx -dump http://site.com/ > file

thanks...never really worried about it. I guess they didn't tell me the whole truth...:mad:
:)

Well, maybe this user didn't try to do any harm, or even knows what he did.

I opened up Lynx and tried to open a url that was down, it said..

"HTTP Request sent, waiting for responce.."

It did that for a few minutes, so I aborted it by doing CTRL + C and I was back at the command prompt.

I ran a top and here's what I got..

8:19am up 11 days, 15:12, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 0.94
100 processes: 83 sleeping, 3 running, 14 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 43.4% user, 56.5% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 509048K av, 450500K used, 58548K free, 87304K shrd, 225988K buff
Swap: 104380K av, 5008K used, 99372K free 50156K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
2453 desk3 13 0 1808 1808 1336 R 0 96.4 0.3 832:33 lynx


It's absolutely killing the server! It's taking up 96.4% of the CPU power and the load is at 1.00 - and all I did is run lynx and attempted to load a URL that was un-reachable..

Lynx can be called via cron. Especially while using php prgrams where command line does not work. However it does not take so much load. It could be the problem with the program lynx is calling that is creating the problem.
Many use it for downloading too....
In my opinion it should be disabled on live servers. Not needed anyway. it is a wonderful software though .... :)

Have a great day
Amar