Syncsort Capacity Management makes it easy to turn on and off the capture of information about Process Accounting in Capture Profiles that are created and edited through by its System Manager component, but it does not itself administer this facility on the UNIX or Linux system.
Your system administrator should be responsible for setting up Process Accounting and for managing the pacct file to avoid filling up disk space unnecessarily.
There is a persistent myth that Process Accounting causes a large overhead on UNIX or Linux systems. The experience of Syncsort Capacity Management customers over many years has proven this not to be the case, and separate papers can be provided to interested parties detailing benchmarking of the true effect of running a system with and without Process Accounting. There is minimal “CPU” overhead as all the effort to capture metrics and make them available for Process Accounting is performed whether or not the facility is active. The only additional thing that turning on Process Accounting does is to write the Process Accounting data to disk for each terminating command.
This will generate additional I/O on a system, but even that is minimal. Consider these numbers:
A system has commands terminating at the rate of 2,500 per second
Standard Process Accounting records are 40-bytes long
This means that there is 100 KB of data being written to disk per second. Modern disks can handle hundreds of megabytes per second, so this additional load represents a tiny part of the capacity of the I/O subsystem’s capabilities. At this rate of command termination, in an hour, Process Accounting will write 360 MB of data. Most systems will not have anything like this rate of data creation.
It must be understood that there is no automatic management of the Process Accounting data file in most UNIX systems. If unmanaged the pacct file will continue to grow while there is free space on a disk. Some variants of UNIX like HP-UX have a built-in cut-off mechanism that disables Process Accounting when the free space on a disk drops below a threshold, and re-enables it when there is again sufficient free space. However, as stated above, Syncsort Capacity Management does not turn Process Accounting on or off, nor does it manage the pacct file for you.