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Sometimes when my LTSP servers are slow, the problem is that there are 25 tuxpaint, firefox, or soffice processes using up all the CPU cycles. These things happen primarily [I believe] because users reset or power off their thin clients without logging out. xterminator is a workaround designed to help minimize this problem by killing all a user's other processes each time she logs in.

It's not a perfect solution because it doesn't kill my runaway processes on server1 until I log into server1 again...but at least this helps.

I implemented a feature to find xterminator's highest parent process and watch for that to exit, and then perform the killings again...but this has a [at least one] bug that periodically killed all the login sessions on a server simultaneously. So I left the code in place but the script exits prior to running it. It would be great to fix this, as it is a much more complete solution.

I'm working on getting xterminator into Ubuntu's universe repository.

Contact Matt Oquist <moquist@majen.net> with all questions, comments, and patches concerning xterminator.

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