STARTPAR

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: Jun 2003
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NAME

startpar - start runlevel scripts in parallel

SYNOPSIS

startpar [-p par] [-i iorate] [-t timeout] [-T global_timeout] [-a arg] prg1 prg2 ...
startpar [-p par] [-i iorate] [-t timeout] [-T global_timeout] -M [ boot|start|stop]

DESCRIPTION

startpar is used to run multiple run-level scripts in parallel. The degree of parallelism on one CPU can be set with the -p option, the default is full parallelism. An argument to all of the scripts can be provided with the -a option. Processes blocked by pending I/O will cause new process creation to be weighted by the iorate factor 800. To change this factor the option -i can be used to specify another value. The amount weight = (nblocked times iorate) / 1000 will be subtracted from the total number of processes which could be started, where nblocked is the number of processes currently blocked by pending I/O.

The output of each script is buffered and written when the script exits, so output lines of different scripts won't mix. You can modify this behaviour by setting a timeout.

The timeout set with the -t option is used as buffer timeout. If the output buffer of a script is not empty and the last output was timeout seconds ago, startpar will flush the buffer.

The -T option timeout works more globally. If no output is printed for more than global_timeout seconds, startpar will flush the buffer of the script with the oldest output. Afterwards it will only print output of this script until it is finished.

The -M option switches startpar into a make(1) like behaviour. This option takes three different arguments: boot, start, and stop for reading .depend.boot or .depend.start or .depend.stop respectively in the directory /etc/init.d/. By scanning the boot and runlevel directories in /etc/rcX.d/ it then executes the appropriate scripts in parallel.

FILES

/etc/init.d/.depend.boot
/etc/init.d/.depend.start
/etc/init.d/.depend.stop

COPYRIGHT

2003,2004 SuSE Linux AG, Nuernberg, Germany.
2007 SuSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany.

AUTHOR

Michael Schroeder <mls@suse.de>
Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Werner Fink <werner@suse.de>