HP Integrity Essentials Overview - Process Resource Manager Overview

HP's Process Resource Manager (PRM) enables the system administrator to focus the appropriate amount of system resources exactly where the business needs them. This powerful resource management tool runs as an addition to the HP UNIX operating system (HP-UX). When PRM is enabled, groups of users or applications are guaranteed a specified portion of the total system central processing unit (CPU) processing cycles, of the available real memory resources, and of the disk bandwidth to logical volume-managed (LVM) systems.

PRM is a resource management tool used to control the amount of resources that processes use during peak system load (at 100% CPU, 100% memory, or 100% disk bandwidth utilization). PRM can guarantee a minimum allocation of system resources available to a group of processes through the use of PRM groups.

A PRM group is a collection of users and applications that are joined together and assigned certain amounts of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth. The two types of PRM groups are FSS PRM groups and PSET PRM groups. An FSS PRM group is the traditional PRM group, whose CPU entitlement is specified in shares. This group uses the Fair Share Scheduler (FSS) in the HP-UX kernel within the system's default processor set (PSET). A PSET PRM group is a PRM group whose CPU entitlement is specified by assigning it a subset of the system's processors (PSET). Processes in a PSET have equal access to CPU cycles on their assigned CPUs through the HP-UX standard scheduler.

Reasons to Use PRM

Improve the response time for critical users and applications.
Set and manage user expectations for performance.
Allocate shared servers based on budgeting.
Ensure that an application package in a Serviceguard cluster has sufficient resources on an active standby system in the event of a failover.
Ensure that critical users or applications have sufficient CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth resources.
Users who at times run critical applications, might at other times engage in relatively trivial tasks. These trivial tasks can be competing in the users' PRM group with critical applications for available CPU and real memory. For this reason, it is often useful to separate applications into different PRM groups or create alternate groups for a user. You can assign a critical application its own PRM group to ensure that the application gets the needed share of resources.
Restrict the CPU, real memory, and disk bandwidth resources available to relatively low-priority users and applications during times of heavy demand.
For example, mail readers can consume significant disk bandwidth when users first come into work or return from lunch. Therefore, you might want to assign an application like mail to a PRM group with small resource allocations and restrict the amount of resources mail can use during such times of heavy demand on the system.
Monitor resource consumption by users or applications.
Assigning a group of users or applications to separate PRM groups can be a good way to keep track of the resources they are using.

HP Systems Insight Manager Technical Reference Guide

Process Resource Manager Overview

Reasons to Use PRM

Accessing Process Resource Manager From HP SIM


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