I have been using ps-node in production for about a year. I have experienced some mystery issues very rarely but never investigated closely enough until today. Finally I realize that, rarely, ps-node is failing to parse the process list correctly and is therefor returning incorrect results.
I know that there is a note about "limitations" for multiple-bytes characters. Is it possible that there was some other process in the system that was using a multi-byte character? Sure, how would I know? The point is that users can't know this, so the "limitation" should be rephrased as, "ps-node is unreliable and sometimes it returns incorrect information". I think this needs to be put up front, at the very top of the readme.
To summarize: ps-node is not to be used anywhere that reliability is important.
I still appreciate the work done by the module writers... I understand that parsing the command-line output is problematic and maybe even impossible in this case. I just think that users should understand this...
For what it's worth, below is an exerpt of what ps-node returned to me in the problem case. I haven't been able to repro since then so I don't know what tickled it. Note that instead of the actual command, some incorreclty-parsed digits are returned:
[
{
"pid": "1314",
"command": "0:00",
"arguments": [
"/lib/systemd/systemd-logind"
],
"ppid": "1"
},
{
"pid": "1324",
"command": "0:20",
"arguments": [
"/usr/lib/snapd/snapd"
],
"ppid": "1"
},
{
"pid": "1346",
"command": "0:00",
"arguments": [
"/usr/sbin/sshd",
"-D"
],
"ppid": "1"
},
{
"pid": "1441",
"command": "0:00",
"arguments": [
"/sbin/agetty",
"--keep-baud",
"115200",
"38400",
"9600",
"ttyS0",
"vt220"
],
"ppid": "1"
},
{
"pid": "1444",
"command": "0:00",
"arguments": [
"/sbin/agetty",
"--noclear",
"tty1",
"linux"
],
"ppid": "1"
}
]
I have been using ps-node in production for about a year. I have experienced some mystery issues very rarely but never investigated closely enough until today. Finally I realize that, rarely, ps-node is failing to parse the process list correctly and is therefor returning incorrect results.
I know that there is a note about "limitations" for multiple-bytes characters. Is it possible that there was some other process in the system that was using a multi-byte character? Sure, how would I know? The point is that users can't know this, so the "limitation" should be rephrased as, "ps-node is unreliable and sometimes it returns incorrect information". I think this needs to be put up front, at the very top of the readme.
To summarize: ps-node is not to be used anywhere that reliability is important.
I still appreciate the work done by the module writers... I understand that parsing the command-line output is problematic and maybe even impossible in this case. I just think that users should understand this...
For what it's worth, below is an exerpt of what ps-node returned to me in the problem case. I haven't been able to repro since then so I don't know what tickled it. Note that instead of the actual command, some incorreclty-parsed digits are returned: