logger and tee running in background?

Question

Sometimes I notice the server is running slowly and at those times a ps -e shows that logger and tee are running but I can't think of why. Is this a known issue? Why would these need to run without being called? When this happens there are very few systems running, but there is some connection to running Chromium maybe but I am not sure.

Answer 1

Use pstree -s <PID> to find out what a process's parents are.

For example:

$ pstree -ps 1518
systemd(1)───nginx(1518)─┬─nginx(1519)
                         ├─nginx(1520)
                         ├─nginx(1521)
                         ├─nginx(1522)
                         └─nginx(1523)

If the process was started by a running service, then systemctl status <PID> will show the corresponding service.

$ systemctl status 1523
● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service.d
           └─override.conf
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2019-08-10 06:36:27 GMT; 2 weeks 4 days ago
 Main PID: 1518 (nginx)
    Tasks: 6
   Memory: 497.3M
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─1518 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
           ├─1519 nginx: worker process
           ├─1520 nginx: worker process
           ├─1521 nginx: worker process
           ├─1522 nginx: worker process
           └─1523 nginx: cache manager process