[phenixbb] Pause phenix runs

Nathaniel Echols nechols at lbl.gov
Fri Apr 12 16:01:14 PDT 2013


On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 5:17 AM, Andrew Purkiss-Trew
<Andrew.Purkiss-Trew at cancer.org.uk> wrote:
> An approach, which I have used with other software, is to signal the process to stop with the kill command.
> You can find the PID at the top of the phenix log, then
> kill -STOP PID
> will pause the process
> kill - CONT PID
> will restart the process.
> Note, I've not tried this on a Mac or with phenix, but it works under Linux.

Somewhat to my surprise, the equivalent calls in the Python API appear
to work perfectly (on my Mac) for pausing and resuming jobs from the
GUI when run in the default mode (as opposed to "detached" mode, but
I'm pretty sure I can get that to work too).  It's going to take at
least a few more days to thoroughly debug, especially since a) I am
rewriting the installers, and b) I desperately need to catch up on
other projects, but I'm pretty confident that the next release (and in
the nearer future, nightly builds) will have the requested "Pause"
button.  (Except on Windows, which - as usual - is broken by design.)

In theory, I think the process memory will be swapped to/from disk as
needed, but I haven't directly tested this.  The CPU load definitely
decreases when it is paused though.

As a side effect, I may have also figured out how to abort jobs almost
immediately instead of having to wait for print statements to
interrupt the programs.  Stay tuned.

-Nat


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