Another source of problems may be related to poorly programmed applications or errors on the part of inexperienced users. Problems such as program looping, page thrashing, and excessive I/O can be isolated to a process with the SHOW SYSTEM command (akin to the UNIX ps command) as shown, in part, as follows:
$ show system OpenVMS V7.1 on node BEAVER 22-SEP-2002 14:45:26.41 Uptime 18 05:02:35 Pid Process Name State Pri I/O CPU Page flts Pages 20200081 SWAPPER HIB 16 0 0 00:00:04.68 0 0 20200086 CONFIGURE HIB 10 39 0 00:00:00.04 174 242 20200088 IPCACP HIB 10 7 0 00:00:00.01 96 175 20200089 ERRFMT HIB 7 11746 0 00:00:21.90 147 232 2020008A CACHE_SERVER HIB 16 994 0 00:00:00.44 80 129 2020008B CLUSTER_SERVER HIB 8 324 0 00:00:03.14 328 557 2020008C OPCOM HIB 8 4605 0 00:00:05.90 1288 228 2020008D AUDIT_SERVER HIB 10 1639 0 00:00:03.18 682 1030 2020008E JOB_CONTROL HIB 10 2565 0 00:00:04.68 277 417 2020008F QUEUE_MANAGER HIB 8 34875 0 00:02:42.98 1400 1802 20200090 SECURITY_SERVER HIB 10 1354 0 00:00:07.37 1915 1516 20200091 SMISERVER HIB 9 147 0 00:00:00.42 666 725 20200092 NETACP HIB 10 36980 0 00:00:06.91 216 436 20200093 EVL HIB 6 237 0 00:00:00.21 510 482 N 20200094 REMACP HIB 8 183 0 00:00:00.12 108 78 20200095 LATACP HIB 14 63 0 00:00:23.92 326 296 20200096 LANACP HIB 13 37 0 00:00:00.10 431 652 20200097 UCX$INET_ACP HIB 8 2671 0 00:00:07.73 455 481 20200098 UCX$INET_ROUTED LEF 6 37 0 00:00:00.13 395 623 S 20200099 IUPOP3 Server HIB 6 3859 0 00:00:08.91 7923 1359 202000A7 DECW$SERVER_0 HIB 6 546 0 00:00:01.73 3479 1073 202000A8 MSAFSSERVER0 COM 4 362 0 00:00:01.02 1530 172 202000A9 DECW$LOGINOUT LEF 4 152 0 00:00:00.92 4068 2470 202000AA MSAP$RCVR0 HIB 6 37 0 00:00:00.12 962 718 20200D39 SYSTEM CUR 4 206 0 00:00:00.55 1618 383
Furthermore, details about a specific process are available using SHOW PROCESS/ ID=. Various levels of detail are available using additional qualifiers. The following example shows only basic information:
$ show process/id=20200d39 22-SEP-2002 14:48:21.24 User: SYSTEM Process ID: 20200D39 Node: BEAVER Process name: "SYSTEM" Terminal: TNA384: (Host: 94.phoenix-12rhl6rt-az.dial-access.att.net Port: 1086 ) User Identifier: [SYSTEM] Base priority: 4 Default file spec: SYS$COMMON:[SYSMGR] Devices allocated: BEAVER$TNA384:
Thus, the use of SHOW SYSTEM and SHOW PROCESS gives the manager detailed information about any process running on the system. This information can be used to isolate software errors, to tune the particular process, or even to tune the system.