Process accounting - did anyone ever use it?

[Steven M Jones]

On 05/31/2019 08:58, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
> On 5/30/19 11:57 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
>> I had it enabled on my FreeBSD boxes and got monthly usage stats. I 
>> did it to make sure that there were no weird users with time, and that 
>> the typical usage was "what I expected". Never detected anything amiss 
>> with this, and at some point I retired all those old boxes and with 
>> them the monthly reporting email.
> 
> This use case seems similar to what I did with disk quotas, or at least 
> why.  Sort of a safety measure / monitoring.  Not actually using it for 
> (internal funny money) billing purposes.

I believe I've heard about a couple instances where PA was used for 
health checks, load distribution, etc for "web-scale" applications on 
thousands of servers running Linux. ISTR in one case it was only enabled 
when needed for tracking down an issue? But this is hearsay, I'm not 
involved in any of the above projects/apps.

But no, not for chargeback so far as I know. I only saw that sort of use 
in academia similar to what others have mentioned - departmental 
budgeting, grant accounting, etc.

--S.