p4 monitor

Display Perforce process information and control long-running tasks.

Syntax

p4 [g-opts] monitor show [-a -l -e -L -s R | T | P | B | F | I ]
p4 [g-opts] monitor terminate id
p4 [g-opts] monitor clear [id | all]
p4 [g-opts] monitor pause id
p4 [g-opts] monitor resume id

Description

p4 monitor allows a system administrator to observe and control Helix server-related processes running on a Helix server machine. Processes are tracked using a dedicated table that is constantly updated. This has a minor impact on server performance.

To use p4 monitor, you must enable monitoring on the Perforce service by setting the monitor configurable with p4 configure.

Valid values for the monitor configurable are:

• 0: Server process monitoring off. (Default)
• 1: monitor active commands
• 2: active commands and idle connections
• 3: sames as 2, but also includes connections that failed to initialize (stuck at the Init() phase)
• 5: sames as 2, but also includes a list of the files locked by the command for more than one second
• 10: same as 5, but also includes lock wait times
• 25: sames as 10, except that the list of files locked by the command includes files locked for any duration

Changes to the monitor configurable affect all new p4 processes that connect to the server. Restarting the server is not required.

See Enabling process monitoring in Helix Core Server Administrator Guide: Fundamentals.

Command syntax variants provide the following alternatives:

• (list level access):To list current process information, use p4 monitor show. By default, all processes are listed, but only the command (for example, sync, edit, submit) is shown, without arguments. Use the -s status option to restrict the display to processes in the specified state.

• (super level access):To show the list of arguments associated with each command, use the -a (arguments) option or -l (long) option. For additional information from the user environment, use the -e (environment) option Use the -L option to show locked files.

• (operator or super level access): To mark a process for termination, use p4 monitor terminate id. This command requires that the user be an operator or have super level access.

  The p4 monitor terminate command does not mark a process for termination unless the process has been running for at least ten seconds. Some commands, such as p4 obliterate, cannot be terminated.

  To control how often the list of processes is refreshed, see the Configurable, db.monitor.interval, which is also mentioned in the Support Knowledgebase article, "Fixing a hung Helix server".

• (operator or super level access): To remove an entry from the monitor table, use p4 monitor clear id. You can clear the entire table with p4 monitor clear all. Both of these commands require super level access. ( If a command terminates prematurely on the server side, it might be erroneously listed as running. You can clear such processes with p4 monitor clear.)

  Processes marked as running continue to run to completion even if removed from the monitor table with p4 monitor clear.

• (operator or super level access): To control the following tasks if they are running too long, use the p4 monitor pause and p4 monitor resume:

  • p4 admin
  • p4 dbstat
  • p4 grep
  • p4 ldapsync -g
  • p4 ping
  • p4 pull
  • p4 verify

Output format

Each line of p4 monitor output consists of the following fields:

pid status owner hh:mm:ss command [args]

pid	The process ID under Unix (or thread ID under Windows)
status	R, T, P, B, F, or I, depending on whether the process is: Running marked for Termination Paused Background Finish Idle Note Finish and Background occur only in replica servers.
owner	The Helix server user name of the user who invoked the command.
hh:mm:ss	The time elapsed since the command was called.
command [args]	The command and arguments as received by the Perforce service.

For example, consider the following output to the p4 monitor show -L command, which displays information about locked files:

8764 R user 00:00:00 edit
      [server.locks/clients/88,d/ws4(W),db.locks(R),db.rev(R)]
8766 R user 00:00:00 edit
      [server.locks/clients/89,d/ws5(W),db.locks(R),db.rev(R)]
8768 R user 00:00:00 monitor

Following pid, status, owner, and time information, this shows two edit commands that have various files locked, including the client workspace lock in exclusive mode for the workspaces ws4 and ws5, and db.locks and db.rev tables in read-only mode.

If you have enabled idle process monitoring (by setting the monitor configurable to 2), idle processes appear with a status of R, but with a command of IDLE.

Some commands (for instance, p4 submit) invoke multiple processes. For example, dm_CommitSubmit or dm_SubmitChange might appear in the output of p4 monitor as two separate phases of the p4 submit command.

Getting pull thread information for replicas

If you are running a replica with monitoring enabled and you have not configured the monitor table to be disk-resident, you can run the following command to get more precise information about what pull threads are doing. (Remember to set monitor.lsof).

$ p4 monitor show -sB -la -L

Command output would look like this:

31701 B uservice-edge3 00:07:24 pull sleeping 1000 ms
    [server.locks/replica/49,d/pull(W)]

Options

You must be an operator or have super access to use the following options:

-a	Show all arguments associated with the process (for example, edit file.c, or sync -f //depot/src/...). Helix server user names are truncated to 10 characters, and each line of output is limited to 80 characters.
-e	Show environment information, including invoking Helix server application (if known), host IP address, and workspace name.
-l	Show all arguments in long form; that is, without truncating user names or the list of command line arguments.
-L	Show information about locked files. The information is collected only for the duration of the p4 monitor command, and is not persisted. Pre-requisites for using this option vary with the platform on which the server is running. On Unix platforms, you must set the monitor.lsof configurable to the following value: $ path/lsof -F pln The value for path varies with the version of Unix you are using. For example, /usr/bin/lsof. There are circumstances in which monitor.lsof might not work for you: your Linux machine does not support lsof, the version of lsof might not work with the Helix server, or the administrator might not be willing to run the lsof command for security reasons. If this is the case, you can still get information about locked files by setting the monitor configurable, described next. Note Microsoft Windows does not have the lsof utility to list open files, and we therefore recommend that Windows systems use values other than 5, 10, or 25. You can use the -z tag option with this option. In that case, the p4 monitor show command will return one lockinfo tag for each file that the process has locked.
-s status	Restrict the display to processes in the Running, Terminated, Paused, Background, Finish, or Idle states.
g-opts	See Global options.

Usage Notes

Can File Arguments Use Revision Specifier?	Can File Arguments Use Revision Range?	Minimal Access Level Required
No	No	list, super

Examples

p4 monitor show	Show Helix server process information (commands only). Requires list access only.
p4 monitor show -l	Show arguments and commands, without limits on line length. Requires super access.
p4 monitor show -a	Show arguments and commands, limited to 80 characters per line of output. Requires super access.
p4 monitor terminate 123	Instruct the Perforce service to mark process 123 for termination. Requires super access.
p4 monitor clear all	Clears the monitor table of all entries. Requires super access.

Related Commands

To turn on monitoring	p4 configure set monitor=1
To turn off monitoring	p4 configure set monitor=0