Skip to main content
Question

Universe Phantom logger

  • January 22, 2026
  • 6 replies
  • 77 views

KevinLynch

Is there a log of phantom processes and pids anywhere?

I have a job scheduler that runs as a phantom and executes jobs from a table at certain times.

I’m having an issue in my scheduler where it appears to run the same task multiple times

on a random basis (ie some days it is just fine, other days  I will see that same job runs multiple times instead of once).   I haven’t been able to figure it out and I was hoping that there was a log somewhere that I could look at

that showed what processes have been started as phantoms.

On Universe 11.3

 

6 replies

Jonathan Smith
Forum|alt.badge.img+4

Have you looked at the &PH& output file for the main scheduler process.

When a process is started as a phantom it creates an entry in the &PH& file which will contain what would have output to the screen.

 


Steven Douglas
  • Participating Frequently
  • January 22, 2026

If the history available in &PH& is not what you are after and you are perhaps looking to see what phantoms are running now, we use a version of PORT.STATUS for that.   PORT.STATUS will show you the attached device on a session and will display ‘phantom’ for running phantom sessions.   We pull the output from PORT.STATUS and look for phantom devices and return that for our own purposes.   We are on Universe on Linux by the way so I’m not sure where you are and it may be different.


KevinLynch
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • January 22, 2026

Yes Jonathan , so the first process shows up in &PH& as normal but the second process does not show in &PH&.

The program emails me with the process and PID in the subject,  so I get two emails one with process 31579 and one with 9804 the time on the second one is like 10 seconds later than the first  ,   there is an &PH& record for 31579 but no &PH& record for 9804.  I’m trying to figure out how the second process is running,  the same scheduler software has been live on dozens of machines for year without this issue.

I’ve been working in Universe for as long as it’s been around and this is one of the strangest issues I’ve ever run across!

 


John Jenkins
Forum|alt.badge.img+1
  • Participating Frequently
  • January 22, 2026

Kevin,

 

Just a thought - how is the process being triggered to launh another PHantom? If it is just waiting on a SLEEP maybe something is waking it up prematurely? or is there an external trigger of some sort?

Regards

JJ


Ryan Ladd
Forum|alt.badge.img
  • Participating Frequently
  • January 27, 2026

Kevin, you said you are on UV 11.3.  We had a problem (UV 11.3.1) where 2 phantoms were being executed and the 2nd one wasn't initializing fully (the LOGIN paragraph wasn’t running).  Our fix (recommended workaround from Rocket) was to insert a 10 second sleep between phantoms but I believe the issue was reportedly fixed on a subsequent UV release.


  • New Participant
  • February 11, 2026

What kind of mechanism you are using to schedule process? Do you calculate timeout on your own while receiving time? Or you using raw sleep?

SLEEP in theory could be interrupted slightly faster, but it needs very specific setup on Unix and this is already fixed in UV14.

Also some of timestamps in Basic api dating back to pick era, mayrollover on midnight, you need to be carefull if using those.