The Process Star Sign Chart


Process starsigns can be identified by the psss program found here. example output:


Aries

Processes of this starsign enjoy to read() and stat(). They are well suited to monitoring agents, programs that take the key role in checking resources and reporting failure. Unfortunately they often fail due to impatiently short timeouts, and make a nusiance of themselves by reporting false alarms.


Taurus

Processes of this starsign prefer to think carefully before every action, they are characterised by heavy CPU usage and slow response times. These programs are reliable and get the job done, and become well liked by sysadmins and users; however they can hog the CPUs and not be very nice(1) to other processes.


Gemini

Processes of this starsign love to communicate, they enjoy traditional IPC such as sockets and pipes, which can generate a strain on the network. This starsign is well suited to GUIs that are fun to have and solve challenging problems - however the GUI interface changes dramatically for every release.


Cancer

Processes of this starsign are fragile, and will often freeze, core dump or go run away. These are the programs that have a mind of their own, they behave in the most illogical manner. Examples of Cancer processes include Sendmail, lpd and vold. Any application with this starsign needs to be well looked after with patches and backups.


Leo

Processes of this starsign enjoy using kill() to control other processes and ioctl() to control devices. They are well suited to master administration programs, such as system or storage administration tools.


Virgo

Processes of this starsign enjoy reading through raw data, especially /proc, /dev/kstat and /dev/openprom. This starsign is well suited to status programs that fetch and print values at regular intervals. They prefer not to interpret the data, leaving that to other programs (such as Aries), and so often report data that is too raw to be meangingful.


Libra

These processes are charming and user friendly, they are often the day-to-day tools that make sysadmins and users happy.


Scorpio

Processes of this starsign like to mount() and fork(). They are powerful programs that excel at their function, but they often lack man pages and documentation. Sometimes they can get stuck trying to access a resource, and can take a while before they timeout and try something else.


Sagittarius

These processes usually rely on new operating system features, libraries and protocols for them to execute. To run them often means upgrading the system or adding new versions of libraries. Many use experimental networking technologies to contact other hosts.


Capricorn

This starsign is best suited to daily tasks in the crontab, such as tape backup programs that march along endlessly each night. Be careful, over time they can become bad tempered and may require reinstallation.


Aquarius

Processes of this starsign behave in unconventional ways, they prefer running on busy systems along with many other processes. They can change their behaviour as different problems are detected. These programs are often hacked together as band-aid solutions, and while needed by the system their code can be quite confusing.


Pisces

This starsign is well suited to debugging programs, they are quite good at analysing other processes and solving their problems. However their own problems and bugs are never solved.