Status of a Linux process

All,

I have fair amount of knowledge about shell scripting, but only liitle on system administration.
I would like to know how to analyze whether the particular linux process is alive or not ? If it is alive, will it affect the performace of other process ?.
Also is it still consuming resource? If so, how much resource its consuming?

Example,

aps 31649 13702 0 Feb17 ? 00:00:00 auto_remote

The above process is running since Feb17,2009. I would like to know whether this process is till doing any useful operation. Is it consuming any resouce, etc.,

Looking at ps C Column which is an indication of the "performance Costs"
And looking at the Time the process consumed I would say it is just waiting.
Also check with ps -ef | grep 31649 if it spawned other processes (is PPID)

To monitor a process top is a good tool to get a quick overview of resource uses.
You might also want to have a look at the nice and renice commands.

lsof is another owerfull command... e.g.
lsof -p 31649

Because Unix is a huge toolbox other might add some more ideas