Date:         Wed, 11 Feb 1998 06:51:14 +1100
Reply-To:     Tim Churches <tchurch@IBM.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         Tim Churches <tchurch@IBM.NET>
Subject:      Killing zombie SAS/CONNECT sessions on Win NT Server
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

We are migrating our SAS/CONNECT servers from Unix to Windows NT. So far
so good but we have noticed that if a client session does not terminate
normally because the client PC crashes or the network connection hiccups
or the modem connection drops out, then that user's SAS session on the
SAS/CONNECT server becomes a zombie, persisting indefinitely, without a
soul (i.e. o link to a client session), just sitting in (paged) memory
doing nothing.
 
Under Unix, because the SAS session on the server is started via a
telnet session, when the telnet server daemon detected that the client
was no longer there it (eventually) killed the SAS session running under
it, which is exactly what one wants to happen. No such luck with Windows
NT when using the NT Spawner service (in noscript mode).
 
Can anyone suggest a solution (or better still, provde one)? I suspect
that the only solution will be to periodically inspect the CPU
utilisation of all SAS session processes on the server and to kill any
process which hasn't used any CPU time in the last 3 hours (or whatever
your definition of "longer than a long lunch" is).
 
Tim Churches