quick-n-easy process timer

[Sean Dudley]

We have a ghost in one of our red hat machines, it seems.  Recently it 
has been serving bmp files (samba) slowly at times.  We can't seem to 
predict when it will have one of it's 'episodes'.  We were able to run 
vmstat, top, etc to start diagnosing it during one of the incidents but 
before we were able to get down and dirty the problem vanished.

One symptom of this is a hefty delay during command execution (top takes 
twenty seconds or more to come up).  Does anyone have a handy cron 
script for checking execution time of a process so we can periodically 
execute a light test process and shoot out a message if execution time 
is longer than X seconds?  I know this wouldn't exactly be challenging 
to write but I thought I'd ask before re-inventing the wheel.

-- 

Sean Dudley
Systems Administrator
The BioDesign Institute
http://www.biodesign.org/
(480) 965-2091 x205
Sean.Dudley at asu.edu