The load one minute average graph for a week. The change was implemented at Jan 16 midnight, and notice the load jumped by 50%.

Interesting. And sort of surprising, since both are spawning processes in a loop. Increased 50% is how large an increase in absolute terms?

NM, didn't see graph. Hrm. Let me do some profiling here. But this probably does add more impetus to CHUKWA-419 or equivalent.

Can you say anything about the configuration settings in use? Which processes are you forking? Same as before, or different?

The commands are identical before and after. Here is what is in my initial_adaptors:

add org.apache.hadoop.chukwa.datacollection.adaptor.ExecAdaptor Iostat 60 /usr/bin/iostat -x -k 55 2 0
add org.apache.hadoop.chukwa.datacollection.adaptor.ExecAdaptor Df 60 /bin/df -l 0
add org.apache.hadoop.chukwa.datacollection.adaptor.ExecAdaptor Sar 60 /usr/bin/sar -q -r -n ALL 55 0
add org.apache.hadoop.chukwa.datacollection.adaptor.ExecAdaptor Top 60 /usr/bin/top -b -n 1 -c 0

The expected period parameter is in seconds, but the code is running as:

timer.schedule(execTimer, 0L, period);

Hence, it's running 1000 times more frequent than expected.

Changed "period" unit from millisecond to second. Only converts to millisecond for scheduling.

Retain change in code instead of interface.

Looks like a good catch. I'll commit this.

I just committed this.

Not sure this entirely will resolve issue; I had thought most of the time the ExecAdaptor is blocked waiting on the underlying process, but that may depend which processes are being invoked. Certainly the fix is worthwhile regardless.