#81 ps miscalculates start time on other nodes

[John Hughes]

ps works out the start time of a process as:

node boot + process start time since node boot.

This gives the right time on the node the process was
started on and the wrong time on all other nodes.

For example:

$ onall ps -fp 637934
(node 1)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep06 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 3)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep15 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 4)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep20 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 5)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep21 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 6)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep13 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 7)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 Sep16 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man(node 9)
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
jamie 637934 637872 0 10:44 ? 00:00:00
/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-session-man

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

I saw this happen a while back with Apache Jakarta Tomcat -
java webapp container. Still need to verify this.

[Roopa Prabhu]

Logged In: YES
user_id=820498

'ps' uses uptime info to calculate start time for a process.
This works well for processes running on local node. Its
currently reading /proc/uptime of the node on which it is
running for all processes. Result of which process's STIME
field is being calculated differently on different node
depending on which node you run ps.
Same bug exits with the %CPU values, as it reads /proc/stat
file (for both top and ps).
Fix:
Get uptime and cpu stat info of all nodes during
initilization of libproc.
Or do not support fields mentioned above in default view
mode as already implemented in 'top'.