#1 Sub-optimal naming of processes

[Frederik Dannemare]

Hi,

think of this more as a comment, rather than a bug
report.

The description of the processes that NetHogs displays
as bandwidth-consuming processes is sub-optimal.

For instace, whenever I use apt-get (debian tool for
downloading packages), the bandwidth-consuming
processes are in NetHogs just called 'http' or 'ftp'. See
http://sentinel.dk/files/nethogs.png. This makes is more
difficult - at least for non-experienced users - to identify
what program is actually using bandwidth.

Also, I use the Konqueror Web Browser and Kmail (both
KDE) a lot, and although they are easy to identify in
Nethogs, their naming (e.g. kmail0L1t0a.slave-socket) is
not perfect (I can easily live with this, though).

Just my comments... love the app overall, and as such I
intend to package it for Debian in the near future, if you
don't mind (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=271040\)

B/R,
Frederik Dannemare

[Arnout Engelen]

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hmm. sounds hard to do in a general way. maybe a
configuration file where you can specify
name-to-'prettyname' mappings as regexps?

As for the debian packaging: way cool! I should note that i
think i'll release version 0.6.0 in the near future (within
one or two weeks), when some current bugs are ironed out of CVS.

[Arnout Engelen]

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hm, of course mappings don't help with the http/ftp. Maybe i
could do something with 'ps aux --forest'-like data.

[Anonymous]

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possibly you could do a 'netstat --program'.
then you have a mapping 'port -> "PID/process name"'.
this would, by the way, solve the problem with currently
unrecognized UDP-segments (if you can decode them).

ok, i got the following line during 'apt-get dist-upgrade':

tcp 0 0 p508AE64B.dip.t-d:38877
ike.egr.msu.edu:www ESTABLISHED6920/http

still "http", so netstat won't really help here.

'ps aux --forest' seems to be helpful, but it is hard to
decide, when you should use a name of a precedessor node
(and which precedessor?). i'm currently thinking that you
should always use the root node of a process tree except for
intetd,crond-induced processes.

--debian-packaging: cool!

[Anonymous]

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by the way: 'top' also displays 'http' as the process name
and nethogs should have (in my opinion, of course) a
behaviour as close to top as possible. (so we could do a
'man top' and search for some feature requests there)

[Arnout Engelen]

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nethogs gets its information from basically the same source
as top and netstat.

choosing what name to use is tricky indeed.

UDP packets are tricky because theoretically i think
multiple programs can listen on the same port
simultaneously, and moreover i don't think it's possible to
learn the source process of an outgoing UDP packet.