Excessive resource usage: xfs (4324) ??

[bigste]

since last week I'm getting a lot of these alerts from lfd, maybe one every hour:-

Time: Wed Apr 27 15:17:03 2011 +0100
Account: xfs
Resource: Process Time
Exceeded: 1853 > 1800 (seconds)
Executable: /usr/bin/xfs
Command Line: xfs -droppriv -daemon
PID: 4290
Killed: No

does anybody know what it means and should I be worried about it?

[cPanelTristan]

xfs is a journaling system and should likely be excluded from these alerts, since it would run beyond 1800 seconds (it isn't high CPU or memory it is using, but simply running a long time per the alert).

Please note that LFD is a third-party product provided by ConfigServer Security & Firewall:

ConfigServer Scripts Forum • Index page

Posting on that forum for any alerts produced by their third party product might be more beneficial, since they will know how to exclude set commands and processes from triggering an alert.

[bigste]

yes, I realise that LFD is a third party product and I agree, a solution to solving the alert may be found on the ConfigServer Forum, however, I was hoping to find out why it would have suddenly started causing an alert.
I'm not familiar with xfs, it seems odd that it should have just started up by itself.
Are there any cPanel processes that may have enabled this journaling system that I could investigate?

[cpanelkenneth]

I think in this context XFS does not refer to the journaling file system, but rather to a font server for X (see: X Font Server - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

[bigste]

I haven't recently installed X or opted to use it at anytime, is there anything new in cPanel that could have triggered this.
I only ever use the command line interface.
Does this suggest that an Xserver session could be running in the background?

[cpanelkenneth]

XFS is often installed as a dependency for various packages. For example, RRDTool (which generates the various bandwidth graphs in the cPanel Bandwidth UI) requires various font and display libraries. It is rather common for one of these to pull in the XFS package as a dependency. Likewise a standard installation of CentOS, or RHEL, will often result in XFS being installed.

This does not mean X is running.

You can usually stop xfs via the following command on the command line:

# /etc/init.d/xfs stop

Also, you can prevent XFS from being started upon boot by issuing the following command on the command line:

# chkconfig xfs off

To confirm XFS will not start on boot (or just to see what runlevels it is enabled for), issue the following command:

# chkconfig --list xfs

You will see output like:

# chkconfig --list xfs
xfs            	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:off	4:on	5:off	6:off

The above commands need executed by root in order to take effect.

[bigste]

Great response Kenneth, and very well documented.

Thanks for that.

[kschaef65]

This was very helpful. Thanks for posting.